Familiarity Is Familiarity Is Familiarity: Event-Related Brain Potentials Reveal Qualitatively Similar Representations of Personally Familiar and Famous Faces

TY - JOUR

T1 - Familiarity Is Familiarity Is Familiarity

T2 - Event-Related Brain Potentials Reveal Qualitatively Similar Representations of Personally Familiar and Famous Faces

AU - Wiese, Holger

AU - Hobden, Georgina

AU - Siilbek, Eike

AU - Martignac, Victoire

AU - Flack, Tessa R.

AU - Ritchie, Kay L.

AU - Young, Andrew W.

AU - Burton, A. Mike

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2021 American Psychological Association

PY - 2022/8

Y1 - 2022/8

N2 - Humans excel in familiar face recognition, but often find it hard to make identity judgements of unfamiliar faces. Understanding of the factors underlying the substantial benefits of familiarity is at present limited, but the effect is sometimes qualified by the way in which a face is known—for example, personal acquaintance sometimes gives rise to stronger familiarity effects than exposure through the media. Given the different quality of personal versus media knowledge, for example in one’s emotional response or level of interaction, some have suggested qualitative differences between representations of people known personally or from media exposure. Alternatively, observed differences could reflect quantitative differences in the level of familiarity. We present 4 experiments investigating potential contributory influences to face familiarity effects in which observers view pictures showing their friends, favorite celebrities, celebrities they dislike, celebrities about whom they have expressed no opinion, and their own face. Using event-related potential indices with high temporal resolution and multiple highly varied everyday ambient images as a strong test of face recognition, we focus on the N250 and the later Sustained Familiarity Effect (SFE). All known faces show qualitatively similar responses relative to unfamiliar faces. Regardless of personal or media-based familiarity, N250 reflects robust visual representations, successively refined over increasing exposure, while SFE appears to reflect the amount of identity-specific semantic information known about a person. These modulations of visual and semantic representations are consistent with face recognition models which emphasize the degree of familiarity but do not distinguish between different types of familiarity.

AB - Humans excel in familiar face recognition, but often find it hard to make identity judgements of unfamiliar faces. Understanding of the factors underlying the substantial benefits of familiarity is at present limited, but the effect is sometimes qualified by the way in which a face is known—for example, personal acquaintance sometimes gives rise to stronger familiarity effects than exposure through the media. Given the different quality of personal versus media knowledge, for example in one’s emotional response or level of interaction, some have suggested qualitative differences between representations of people known personally or from media exposure. Alternatively, observed differences could reflect quantitative differences in the level of familiarity. We present 4 experiments investigating potential contributory influences to face familiarity effects in which observers view pictures showing their friends, favorite celebrities, celebrities they dislike, celebrities about whom they have expressed no opinion, and their own face. Using event-related potential indices with high temporal resolution and multiple highly varied everyday ambient images as a strong test of face recognition, we focus on the N250 and the later Sustained Familiarity Effect (SFE). All known faces show qualitatively similar responses relative to unfamiliar faces. Regardless of personal or media-based familiarity, N250 reflects robust visual representations, successively refined over increasing exposure, while SFE appears to reflect the amount of identity-specific semantic information known about a person. These modulations of visual and semantic representations are consistent with face recognition models which emphasize the degree of familiarity but do not distinguish between different types of familiarity.

KW - event-related potential

KW - face recognition

KW - familiarity

KW - N250

KW - sustained familiarity effect

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85119299807&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1037/xlm0001063

DO - 10.1037/xlm0001063

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85119299807

SN - 0278-7393

VL - 48

SP - 1144

EP - 1164

JO - Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition

JF - Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition

IS - 8

ER -