Familiarity matters: A review on prioritized processing of personally familiar faces

ABSTRACT

In this review, we synthesize the existing literature investigating personally familiar face processing and highlight the remarkable, enhanced processing efficiency resulting from real-life experience. Highly learned identity-specific visual and semantic information associated with personally familiar face representations facilitates detection, recognition of identity and social cues, and activation of person knowledge. These optimizations afford qualitatively different processing of personally familiar as compared to unfamiliar faces, which manifests on both the behavioural and neural level.

KEYWORDS:

• Personally familiar face processing
• detection
• recognition
• identification
• ERPs
• fMRI

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Jim Haxby, Brad Duchaine, Matteo Visconti di Oleggio Castello, Swaroop Guntupalli, and Carlo Cipolli for helpful discussion and insightful comments on a previous version of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Meike Ramon http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5753-5493

Maria Ida Gobbini http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6727-7934

Notes

1. Several studies have used the term “recognition” to describe the process of determining the familiarity of a face (e.g., Besson et al., 2017; Busigny, Bled, Besson, & Barbeau, 2012; Caharel et al., 2014; Ramon, 2015b; Ramon et al., 2015; Ramon et al., 2011; Van Belle et al., 2010).

2. Recent studies that have employed MVPA have provided evidence for identity-specific representations of famous faces in the FFA (Axelrod & Yovel, 2015). Using a visual familiarization regime involving face learning with dynamic videos, Guntupalli et al. (2017) found identity-specific and view-invariant representations with MVPA in the FFA, the ATFA, and the right inferior frontal face area (rIFFA, see Figure 5c).