Searching for Politicians: An Information-Processing Approach to Face Recognition

Abstract

Previous work on face recognition has concentrated on the processing of unfamiliar faces. This paper examines the recognition of already familiar faces, specifically politicians. Three experiments are described in which the subject's task was to search through a series of faces for particular target politicians. In Experiment I the function relating search time to target set size was found to be negatively accelerated. A similar function was observed when names were used as search items. In Experiment II all subjects searched for four targets, and the relationship between distractors and target items was varied. Distractors rated visually similar to the targets took longer to reject than those rated dissimilar. Distractors who were other politicians took longer to reject than actors, and this effect of semantic category was independent of visual similarity. In Experiment III, where subjects searched for a single target, semantic category appeared only to have an effect when the distractors were also visually similar to the target. Models of the rejection process are discussed, and the similarities between the effects observed here, with faces, and those reported elsewhere for words are pointed out.