中華心理學刊 民100，53卷，4期，437-470
Chinese Journal of Psychology 2011, Vol.53, No.4, 437-470

Gary C.-W. Shyi（Department of Psychology, National Chung Cheng University；Center for Research in Cognitive Science, National Chung Cheng University）；Huei-Ming He（Department of Psychology, National Chung Cheng University；Center for Research in Cognitive Science, National Chung Cheng University）

Abstract

Our ability in face recognition varies with familiarity of faces we encounter, and familiarity may affect both the representation and processing of faces. Here we proposed a model for classifying faces where familiarity varied along two continuous dimensions, frequency of contact and directness of contact, creating four possible types of familiarity. Hypotheses pertaining to recognizing faces of Types I (close friends), III (strangers), and IV (celebrity) familiarity were proposed and tested in Experiments 1A and 1B. Results showed effects of familiarity in that the higher the frequency of contact and the more direct the contact, the better face recognition (i.e., Type I > Type IV > Type III). Furthermore, recognition of Type-I faces was immune to variation in expression between the learned and test images, whereas recognition of Type-III faces was easily disrupted by change in expression. However, evidence for average face as the underlying representation for Type-IV faces was less clear than expected in that average faces derived from greater number of images failed to outperform those derived from fewer images. In Experiments 2 and 3, we explored the possibility of transforming familiarity type along the dimension of contact frequency by varying the numbers of exposure and expression of Type-III faces. Results showed that the original images were better recognized than those with altered expressions. Moreover, performance on faces with fewer exposures was impaired by variation in expression, especially when targets were old; however, with sufficient exposures, performance was enhanced by variation in expression when targets were new. We posited that variation in expression gives rise to generalization, whereas memory of the original image represents a consolidated trace of a specific expression leading to image matching. Taken together, the results lend support to the proposed familiarity model, which also provides a framework for examining factors that may help transform faces of one type of familiarity into another.

Keywords: expression variation, face recognition, familiarity, generalization, image matching