Getting to know you: From view-dependent to view-invariant repetition priming for unfamiliar faces

Abstract

Recent research suggests that repetition priming (RP) for unfamiliar faces is highly view dependent and is eliminated when the viewpoint of target faces changes between study and test. The current research examined whether increased familiarity with novel faces from a single viewpoint at study would support RP from an alternative viewpoint at test. Participants passively viewed novel face images from a single viewpoint at study (i.e., either front or three-quarters), with half of the images seen once and half seen on five occasions. During a sex classification task at test, participants were faster to respond to face images seen from the same view as that at study than they were to previously unseen distractor faces for both single exposure faces and faces seen on five occasions (i.e., standard RP). When, however, face images at test were shown from a different viewpoint from that at study, RP only occurred for faces viewed on five occasions.

Keywords:

• Social cognition
• Face processing
• Repetition priming
• Implicit memory
• Person perception

We thank Stefan Schweinberger and two anonymous reviewers for their very useful comments on an earlier draft of this work.

Notes

¹ Alpha levels for pairwise comparisons were Bonferroni corrected.