Adaptation effects of highly familiar faces: Immediate and long lasting

Memory & Cognition December 2007, Volume 35, Issue 8, pp 1966–1976 | Cite as Adaptation effects of highly familiar faces: Immediate and long lasting AuthorsAuthors and affiliations Claus-Christian CarbonTilo StrobachStephen R. H. LangtonGéza HarsányiHelmut LederGyula Kovács Article 561 Downloads 2 Citations Abstract A central problem of face identification is forming stable representations from entities that vary—both in a rigid and nonrigid manner—over time, under different viewing conditions, and with altering appearances. Three experiments investigated the underlying mechanism that is more flexible than has often been supposed. The experiments used highly familiar faces that were first inspected as configurally manipulated versions. When participants had to select the veridical version (known from TV/media/movies) out of a series of gradually altered versions, their selections were biased toward the previously inspected manipulated versions. This adaptation effect (face identity aftereffect, Leopold, Rhodes, Müller, & Jeffery, 2005) was demonstrated even for a delay of 24h between inspection and test phase. Moreover, the inspection of a specific image version of a famous person not only changed the veridicality decision of the same image, but also transferred to other images of this person as well. Thus, this adaptation effect is apparently not based on simple pictorial grounds, but appears to have a rather structural basis. Importantly, as indicated by Experiment 3, the adaptation effect was not based on a simple averaging mechanism or an episodic memory effect, but on identity-specific information. KeywordsFace Recognition Test Phase Adaptation Effect Simple Main Effect Test Face  These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves. Download to read the full article text References Baddeley, A. D. 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