People can discriminate the identities of faces of their own race better than faces of other races ( Feingold, 1914 Rhodes, Tan, Brake, & Taylor, 1989). Several studies suggest that faces we encounter in early life ( Slater et al., 2010) or on a regular basis ( O'Toole, Deffenbacher, Valentin, & Abdi, 1994) play a dominant role in shaping the dimensions of face space. Face images for different identities that are located close to each other are harder to discriminate as compared to those that are distant from each other in face space. Vectors for images of the same identity are located close to each other in this multidimensional face space. A compelling explanation for how we can discriminate different identities reliably comes from the hypothesis that faces are encoded as vectors in a high multidimensional representational space ( Valentine, 1991 Lee, Byatt, & Rhodes, 2000 Leopold, O'Toole, Vetter, & Blanz, 2001 Jiang, Blanz, & O'Toole, 2007). Human beings are adept at detecting, identifying, and discriminating between faces, despite the high degree of visual similarity based on first-order features. Our results suggest that familiarity warps the representational geometry of face space, amplifying perceptual distances for small changes in the appearance of familiar faces that are inconsistent with the structural features that define their identities. We found a narrower categorical boundary for the identity of personally familiar faces when they were mixed with unfamiliar identities as compared to the control condition, in which the appearance of two unfamiliar faces was mixed. The aim of the two experiments was to assess how categorical boundaries for recognition of identity are affected by familiarity. Here we tested the flexibility of familiar face recognition with a morphing paradigm where the appearance of a personally familiar face was mixed with the appearance of a stranger ( Experiment 1) and the appearance of one's own face with the appearance of a familiar face and the appearance of a stranger ( Experiment 2). Recognition of familiar as compared to unfamiliar faces is robust and resistant to marked image distortion or degradation.
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