Face Recognition Across Viewpoint

In two experiments we examined the ability of human observers to recognize faces from novel viewpoints. Previous work has indicated that there are marked declines in recognition performance when observers learn a particular view of a face and are asked to recognize the face from a novel viewpoint. We replicate these ndings and extend them in several ways. First, we replicate the well-known 3/4 view advantage for recognition and extend it to show that this advantage is stronger than would be expected simply due to the 3/4 view being the center of the learned views. In the second experiment, we found little evidence for advantageous transfer to a symmetric view of the other side of the face, in all cases, observers were much better at recognizing a face from the side learned. Third, we extended past results to explore the consistency of face recognizability for individual faces across di erent views and view transfer conditions. We found only a modest relationship between the recognizability of individual faces in the di erent view conditions. These data give insight into the organization of memory for faces and its stability across changes in viewpoint. Many thanks are due to Niko Troje and Isabelle B ultho for the stimulus creation and processing. Alice O'Toole gratefully acknowledges support by the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung and the hospitality of the Max-Planck Institut f ur biologische Kybernetik. Please direct all correspondence to A. J. O'Toole, School of Human Development, GR4.1, The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX 75083-0688, TEL: (214) 883-2486, Email: otoole@utdallas.edu This document is available as /pub/mpi-memos/TR-21.ps.Z via anonymous ftp from ftp.mpik-tueb.mpg.de or from the World Wide Web, http://www.mpik-tueb.mpg.de/projects/TechReport/list.html.