2011 volume 40(4) pages 437 – 449
doi:10.1068/p6794

Cite as:
Ramon M, Caharel S, Rossion B, 2011, "The speed of recognition of personally familiar faces" Perception 40(4) 437 – 449
Download citation data in RIS format

The speed of recognition of personally familiar faces

Meike Ramon, Stephanie Caharel, Bruno Rossion

Received 9 August 2010, in revised form 18 February 2011; published online 18 Aprill 2011

Abstract. Despite the generally accepted notion that humans are very good and fast at recognising familiar individuals from their faces, the actual speed with which this fundamental brain function can be achieved remains largely unknown. Here, two groups of participants were required to respond by finger-lift when presented with either a photograph of a personally familiar face (classmate), or an unfamiliar one. This speeded manual go/no-go categorisation task revealed that personally familiar faces could be categorised as early as 380 ms after presentation, about 80 ms faster than unfamiliar faces. When response times were averaged across all 8 stimulus presentations, we found that minimum RTs for both familiar and unfamiliar face decisions were substantially lower (310 ms and 370 ms). Analyses confirmed that stimulus repetition enhanced the speed with which faces were categorised, irrespective of familiarity, and that repetition did not affect the observed benefit in RTS for familiar over unfamiliar faces. These data, representing the elapsed time from stimulus onset to motor output, put constraints on the time course of familiar face recognition in the human brain, which can be tracked more precisely by high temporal resolution electrophysiological measures.

This article has supplementary online material: Colour figure

Restricted material:

PDF Full-text PDF size: 353 Kb

HTML References  56 references, 50 with DOI links (Crossref)

Your computer (IP address: 107.20.7.65) has not been recognised as being on a network authorised to view the full text or references of this article. If you are a member of a university library that has a subscription to the journal, please contact your serials librarian (subscriptions information).