Generalization across View in Face Memory and Face Matching

Abstract

While a change in view is considered to be one of the most damaging manipulations for facial identification, this phenomenon has been measured traditionally with tasks that confound perceptual processes with recognition memory. This study explored facial identification with a pairwise matching task to determine whether view generalization is possible when memory factors are minimised. Experiment 1 showed that the detrimental view effect in recognition memory is attenuated in face matching. Moreover, analysis of individual differences revealed that some observers can identify faces across view with perfect accuracy. This was replicated in Experiment 2, which also showed that view generalization is unaffected when only the internal facial features are shown. These results indicate that the view effect in recognition memory does not arise from data limits, whereby faces contain insufficient visual information to allow identification across views. Instead, these findings point to resource limits, within observers, that hamper such person identification in recognition memory.