Accelerated recognition of left oblique views of faces

Abstract

Because faces in portraits are depicted more frequently in a left rather than a right oblique (half-profile or 3/4) view, we addressed the question of whether people find it easier to recognize the left or right 3/4 view of a familiar person's face. We examined the ability of 13 subjects to match familiar faces that were presented in either the left or right 3/4 view, with names that were presented either before or after the faces (face-name and name-face matching tasks, respectively). In both tasks, the subjects responded more rapidly to a left than to a right 3/4 view of the same face. This suggests that during face recognition the processing of information from faces that are presented in the left 3/4 view is dominant over the processing of right 3/4 views of familiar faces.