Familiar and unfamiliar face recognition: A review

Since the 1970s there has been a continuing interest in how people recognise familiar faces (Bruce, 1979;

Ellis, 1975). This work has complemented investigations of how unfamiliar faces are processed and the

findings from these two strands of research have given rise to accounts that propose qualitatively

different forms of representation for familiar and unfamiliar faces. Evidence to suggest that we process

familiar and unfamiliar faces in different ways is available from cognitive neuropsychology, brain

scanning, and psychophysics. However, in this review we focus on the evidence, available from

experimental investigations of how people recognise faces, for different types of representation existing

for each type of face. Factors affecting recognition are evaluated in terms of how they apply to familiar

and unfamiliar faces and categorised according to the nature of their impact. In the final section this

evidence, along with recent advances in the field, is used to explore the way in which unfamiliar faces

may become familiar and the factors that may be important for the development of familiar face

representations.