The role of active exploration of 3D face stimuli on recognition memory of facial information

Research on face recognition has mainly relied on methods in which observers are relatively passive viewers of face stimuli. This study investigated whether active exploration of three-dimensional (3D) face stimuli could facilitate recognition memory. A standard recognition task and a sequential matching task were employed in a yoked design. Observers in the active condition explored 3D views of faces via a mouse or joystick during the training and test sessions of the task, whereas observers in the passive condition simply viewed the replay of the same sequence of face stimuli generated by the active observers. It was found that the active condition produced better recognition accuracy than the passive condition. The study provides the first evidence that active exploration of 3D face stimuli can lead to better face recognition memory and matching performance.