PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Matteo Visconti di Oleggio Castello
AU  - Kelsey G. Wheeler
AU  - Carlo Cipolli
AU  - M. Ida Gobbini
TI  - Familiarity Facilitates Feature-based Face Processing
AID  - 10.1101/058537
DP  - 2016 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 058537
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/08/10/058537.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/08/10/058537.full
AB  - Recognition of personally familiar faces is remarkably efficient, effortless and robust. We asked if feature-based face processing drives facilitated detection of familiar faces by testing the effect of face inversion on a visual search task for familiar and unfamiliar faces. Because face inversion disrupts configural and holistic face processing, we hypothesized that inversion would diminish the familiarity advantage to the extent that it is mediated by such processes. Subjects detected personally familiar and stranger target faces in arrays of two, four, or six face images. Subjects showed significant facilitation of personally familiar face detection for both upright and inverted faces, in terms of reaction times for target present trials and both reaction times and search rate for target absent trials. The effect of familiarity even on target absent trials suggests that familiarity facilitates rejection of unfamiliar distractors as well as detection of familiar targets. The preserved familiarity effect for inverted faces suggests that facilitation of face detection afforded by familiarity reflects mostly feature-based processes.