TITLE:
Familiar and Unfamiliar Face Recognition in a Crowd
AUTHORS:
Hiroshi Ito, Aki Sakurai
KEYWORDS:
Personally Familiar Face, Famous Face, Unfamiliar Face, Face Perception, Visual Search
JOURNAL NAME:
Psychology,
Vol.5 No.9,
July
21,
2014
ABSTRACT: The
purpose of the present study was to investigate whether the visual search
process for familiar faces differs from that for unfamiliar faces. We used a
single-target visual search task and recorded eye movements of participants
during the task. We employed three different types of face familiarity:
personally familiar faces (friends and teachers), famous faces, and unfamiliar
faces. Participants had to search through arrays of faces for a target face. In
each trial, a target face and three distractor faces were horizontally aligned
and presented at the same time. In the personally familiar or famous condition,
the target was a personally familiar face or a famous face, respectively, and
the distractor faces were unfamiliar. In the unfamiliar condition, the target
was an unfamiliar face and the distractor faces were personally familiar. The
reaction times to identify the target demonstrated that the visual search for
unfamiliar faces is slower than that for personally familiar faces and famous
faces, but there was no significant difference between reaction times to recognize
the personally familiar and the famous face targets. Additionally, the eye
movement results in the unfamiliar face condition showed that an exhaustive
search of the entire array occurred more frequently than a self-terminating
search, but this was not true for both the personally familiar faces and famous
faces conditions. These results suggest that the visual search process for
familiar faces (personally familiar and famous) in a crowd differs from that
for unfamiliar faces.