What Happens when a Face Rings a Bell ?: The Automatic Processing of Famous Faces

Abstract

One of the earliest and most fundamental decisions that can be made when viewing a face is whether or not this has previously been encountered. It is only recently, however, that psychologists have concentrated their attention on the problem of how familiarity influences the types of processing and storage involved in face recognition. What will be attempted here is; to explore what is meant by familiarity, to highlight how and where familiarity might produce processing changes, and to report the findings of an experiment which attempted to investigate two of these proposed loci.