Judgement of lateral orientation for previously seen and unseen photographs of faces.

Abstract

In Study 1, 56 undergraduates judged whether each member of two sets of unseen photographs of faces was shown in the original or reversed orientation. Performance was at chance level, indicating that they could not perform this task. In Studies 2 and 3, the first of which involved unanalyzed data from previously-published work, an investigation was made of identification of orientation for faces which had been laterally reversed in the course of experiments on recognition memory. For a total of 406 subjects, over-all identification accuracy was about 60%, which was above chance. However, subjects were correct more often on normal (unchanged) than on reversed (changed) faces and were generally more likely to identify a face as normal when they were certain than when they were uncertain in their initial recognition judgement. It was concluded that identification performance could largely be accounted for by a response strategy model in which subjects judged orientation on the basis of their subjective familiarity with the face. Together, these studies demonstrate that subjects could not usually detect the lateral orientation of previously-seen or of unseen photographs of faces.