Prioritized Detection of Personally Familiar Faces

Abstract

We investigated whether personally familiar faces are preferentially processed in conditions of reduced attentional resources and in the absence of conscious awareness. In the first experiment, we used Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) to test the susceptibility of familiar faces and faces of strangers to the attentional blink. In the second experiment, we used continuous flash interocular suppression to render stimuli invisible and measured face detection time for personally familiar faces as compared to faces of strangers. In both experiments we found an advantage for detection of personally familiar faces as compared to faces of strangers. Our data suggest that the identity of faces is processed with reduced attentional resources and even in the absence of awareness. Our results show that this facilitated processing of familiar faces cannot be attributed to detection of low-level visual features and that a learned unique configuration of facial features can influence preconscious perceptual processing.

Familiarity Facilitates Feature-based Face Processing

“…This result adds to the evidence that personally familiar faces benefit from facilitated processing in a variety of experimental conditions [13][14][15] and real-life situations [7].…”

“…With a saccadic reaction paradigm, we found that participants were able to detect and shift their gaze to familiar faces in 180 ms [15] when the distractors were faces of strangers, a latency shorter a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 than the known evoked potentials that differentiate familiar from stranger faces [16]; but see [17]). Overall, these results highlight a difference in processing between familiar and unfamiliar faces and point to a facilitation of familiar face processing that precedes the activation of a conscious, view-invariant representation [13,15], and that extends to the local features of a familiar face [12,14].…”

“…The advantage for familiar faces was 114 ms [97,131] in the upright condition, and 75 ms [55,95] in the inverted condition, with a difference of 39 ms [13,65] [11,32]). The search slopes for inverted faces were steeper than those for upright faces, and they did not differ across familiarity The search slopes in the target absent trials were about two times those in the target present trials, consistent with a serial self-terminating search [58,60,61].…”

“…Familiar as compared to unfamiliar faces can be detected with reduced attentional resources and can be processed without conscious awareness [13]. Moreover, social cues, such as eyegaze or head orientation, are processed faster when conveyed by familiar faces [14].…”

A global attentional scope setting prioritizes faces for conscious detection

“…Previous studies have shown that CFS times are sensitive to manipulations of the saliency and familiarity of face images. For example, upright faces break from suppression faster than inverted faces (Jiang et al, 2007;Stein, Sterzer, & Peelen, 2012;Zhou, Zhang, Liu, Yang, & Qu, 2010); fearful faces break from suppression faster than neutral or happy faces (Yang, Zald, & Blake, 2007); faces presented with direct gaze break from suppression faster than faces with averted gaze (Chen & Yeh, 2012;Stein, Senju, Peelen, & Sterzer, 2011); familiar faces break from suppression faster than unfamiliar faces (Gobbini et al 2013); and finally, faces of the observer's own age and race also break from suppression more quickly than other-age and other-race faces (Stein, End, & Sterzer, 2014). Taken together, these results suggest that the visual system prioritizes the detection of salient and familiar faces, and that information signaling such saliency and familiarity may be extracted prior to the face stimulus reaching conscious awareness.…”