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 findings 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 different views and view transfer conditions. We found only a modest relationship between the recognizability of individual faces in the different view conditions. These data give insight into the organization of memory for faces and its stability across changes in viewpoint