Understanding face identification through within-person variability in appearance: Introduction to a virtual special issue.

Markus Bindemann,Graham J Hole

doi:10.1177/1747021820959068

Abstract

In the effort to determine the cognitive processes underlying the identification of faces, the dissimilarities between images of different people have long been studied. In contrast, the inherent variability between different images of the same face has either been treated as a nuisance variable that should be eliminated from psychological experiments or it has not been considered at all. Over the past decade, research efforts have increased substantially to demonstrate that this within-person variation is meaningful and can give insight into various processes of face identification, such as identity matching, face learning, and familiar face recognition. In this virtual special issue of the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, we explain the importance of within-person variability for face identification and bring together recent relevant articles published in the journal.

Highlights

For many decades the study of face perception has been a mainstream topic in Psychology, investigated by scientists around the globe, with much of this research published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
In its simplest form, recognition of familiar faces in psychological experiments can be tested by presenting a single photograph of a person and by asking participants to decide whether or not this person is familiar (Young et al, 1985), by asking them to name the person (Russell et al, 2009), or to classify faces based on stored semantic information such as occupation and nationality (Bindemann et al, 2005)
Direct means to examine the identification of unfamiliar faces are visual matching tasks, in which observers have to decide whether two side-by-side faces depict the same person or different people (Burton et al, 2010; Fysh & Bindemann, 2018), or lineup tasks, in which a target has to be identified from among a set of faces (Bindemann et al, 2012; Bruce et al, 1999; Megreya & Burton, 2008)