Extracting mean and individual identity from sets of famous faces M Neumann1, S R Schweinberger2, A M Burton3 |
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1School of Psychology, CCD and The University of Western Australia, Australia |
| We can accurately extract a variety of information from a single face, such as a person’s gender, emotional state, or identity. When seeing crowds – or sets – of unfamiliar faces, participants rapidly code a mean identity representation of the set. Here, we examine ensemble coding for familiar faces, for which participants have rich pre-existing mental representations. In the first experiment, participants saw sets of faces, each consisting of four different celebrities of the same sex. Following each set, a single probe face appeared and participants indicated whether or not it had been presented in the previous set. As expected, participants very accurately identified the actual set celebrities. Strikingly, they also consistently gave large proportions of “present” responses when the probe was a morphed face created from the previous set’s celebrities (the “set mean”). This is the first data suggesting that ensemble coding of identity occurs for famous faces. In a second experiment, ensemble coding for facial identity was reduced when sets consisted of each two male and two female faces. In conclusion, mean set identity appears to be extracted from famous face crowds in parallel with accurate exemplar representations, when set exemplars belong to a common subcategory (e.g., same gender). |
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