The perception of a familiar face is no more than the sum of its parts

Why do faces become easier to recognize with repeated exposure? Previous research has suggested that familiarity may induce a qualitative shift in visual processing from an independent analysis of individual facial features to analysis that includes information about the relationships among features (Farah, Wilson, Drain, & Tanaka Psychological Review, 105, 482–498, 1998; Maurer, Grand, & Mondloch Trends in Cognitive Science, 6, 255–260, 2002). We tested this idea by using a “summation-at-threshold” technique (Gold, Mundy, & Tjan Psychological Science, 23, 427–434, 2012; Nandy & Tjan Journal of Vision, 8, 3.1–20, 2008), in which an observer’s ability to recognize each individual facial feature shown independently is used to predict their ability to recognize all of the features shown in combination. We find that, although people are better overall at recognizing familiar as opposed to unfamiliar faces, their ability to integrate information across features is similar for unfamiliar and highly familiar faces and is well predicted by their ability to recognize each of the facial features shown in isolation. These results are consistent with the idea that familiarity has a quantitative effect on the efficiency with which information is extracted from individual features, rather than a qualitative effect on the process by which features are combined.