Routes through the Face Recognition System

Abstract

Two experiments are reported which seek to examine the proposition first put forward by Hay and Young (1982), that recognition of a known person after seeing his or her face proceeds through a series of sequentially organized stages. In both experiments subjects were shown a selection of famous and unfamiliar faces and required to state whether each face was familiar. They were then asked to recall semantic information and the person's name. Of all the possible response types, only some are predicted by models derived from Hay and Young (1982), and only these responses were observed in Experiment 1. In order to give as complete an account as possible of the slips and errors made by subjects, they were interrogated some days after completing the testing phase in Experiment 2. As in the first experiment, the results supported the view that distinct but successive stages are involved in everyday face recognition. The method developed here provides an extension of the “diary” type of study of everyday recognition errors into laboratory conditions, which confirms the findings of studies of everyday errors and provides strong support for sequential models.