Right cerebral hemisphere superiority for recognizing the internal and external features of famous faces

Abstract

Right-handed male and female subjects were asked to identify bilaterally presented famous faces from an upright display of all the faces used in the experiment, under 4 conditions: these involved presentation of upright external features, upright internal features, upright whole faces and inverted whole faces. The task was one of identification in the sense of picking out presented faces from a display of all the possible faces, and did not require explicit naming of the famous people. Left visual hemifield superiorities were found for upright external features, upright internal features and upright whole faces, which did not vary across these 3 conditions. Overall performance levels did vary, with whole faces better identified than internal features, which were in turn better identified than external features. The presentation of inverted whole faces led to poorer overall performance than for upright faces, and no visual hemifield asymmetry. These results show that the right cerebral hemisphere is better able than the left to recognize known faces from both internal and external features.