Face processing
How quickly can we recognize a famous face?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Even when pushed to respond as fast as possible, people needed roughly 180 extra milliseconds to tell a famous face from an unknown one compared with simply detecting that a human face was there.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Within-subject speeded go/no-go categorization of briefly flashed photos in three tasks (human vs animal face, gender, famous vs unknown), plus a separate control group trained on the famous faces over five sessions
- N
- N=18 · 18 participants in the main experiment; 7 different participants in the control (face-learning) experiment
- Population
- Young Caucasian adult volunteers with normal or corrected vision, in Toulouse, France
- Outcome
- Minimum, median and mean go reaction times and accuracy per task; response bias (C) and sensitivity (d′)
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Key findings
Detecting a human face was fastest and most accurate (97.8% correct), gender judgements were close behind, and famous-face recognition was slowest and least accurate (74.9%). The fastest reliable responses to famous faces came at 467 ms, versus 285 ms for detecting a human face, a gap of around 180-190 ms that appeared in every participant. Recognizing famous faces was also about 160 ms slower than judging gender on the same photos, and participants were more cautious (more conservative bias) in the famous-face task. After learning the faces, the control group reached about 90% accuracy but was still about 120 ms slower than simple face detection.
Methodology
Eighteen young adults saw photographs flashed for 100 ms and lifted their fingers from a pad as fast as possible when a target appeared. In separate blocks the target was a human face among animal faces, a face of their own gender, or a famous face among unknown faces. The gender and famous-face tasks used the same pictures, so any speed difference could not be put down to the images alone. A separate group of seven people then repeatedly studied the famous faces over five sessions to see whether practice would close the speed gap.
Limitations
The main sample was small (18 people, all young and Caucasian) and the control experiment had only seven participants. Famous-face recognition depends on each person's cultural knowledge, so the task was harder and less accurate, and difficulty cannot be ruled out entirely even though several checks argued against it. The study measures behaviour only, so its explanations of the extra time (more ventral-stream processing, feedback, or access to person knowledge) are hypotheses, not tested brain mechanisms. Results come from a bottom-up task with no advance cue about who might appear, so they may not apply when people are looking for a specific person.
How this study connects
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