Multiple images captured from a single encounter do not promote face learning.

Viewing multiple images of a newly encountered face improves recognition of that identity in new instances. Studies examining face learning have presented high-variability (HV) images that incorporate changes that occur from moment-to-moment (e.g.

Children's ability to recognize their parent's face improves with age.

Adults are experts at recognizing familiar faces across images that incorporate natural within-person variability in appearance (i.e., ambient images).

What happens to our representation of identity as familiar faces age? Evidence from priming and identity aftereffects.

Matching identity in images of unfamiliar faces is error prone, but we can easily recognize highly variable images of familiar faces - even images taken decades apart. Recent theoretical development based on computational modelling can account for how we recognize extremely variable instances of the same identity. We provide complementary behavioural data by examining older adults' representation of older celebrities who were also famous when young.

The sibling familiarity effect: Is within?person facial variability shared across siblings?

Humans are experts at familiar face recognition, but poor at unfamiliar face recognition. Familiarity is created when a face is encountered across varied conditions, but the way in which a person's appearance varies is identity?specific, so familiarity with one identity does not benefit recognition of other individuals. However, the faces of biological siblings share structural similarities, so we explored whether the benefits of familiarity are shared across siblings.

Recognising Familiar Faces Out of Context.

Expertise in familiar face recognition has been well-documented in several studies. Here, we examined the role of context using a surprise lecturer recognition test. Across two experiments, we found few students recognised their lecturer when they were unexpected, but accuracy was higher when the lecturer was preceded by a prompt.

Attending to identity cues reduces the own-age but not the own-race recognition advantage.

Adults' ability to recognize individual faces is shaped by experience. Young adults recognize own-age and own-race faces more accurately than other-age and other-race faces. The own-age and own-race biases have been attributed to differential perceptual experience and to differences in how in-group vs.

How does a newly encountered face become familiar? The effect of within-person variability on adults' and children's perception of identity.

Adults and children aged 6years and older easily recognize multiple images of a familiar face, but often perceive two images of an unfamiliar face as belonging to different identities. Here we examined the process by which a newly encountered face becomes familiar, defined as accurate recognition of multiple images that capture natural within-person variability in appearance. In Experiment 1 we examined whether exposure to within-person variability in appearance helps children learn a new face.

That's my teacher! Children's ability to recognize personally familiar and unfamiliar faces improves with age.

Most previous research on the development of face recognition has focused on recognition of highly controlled images. One of the biggest challenges of face recognition is to identify an individual across images that capture natural variability in appearance. We created a child-friendly version of Jenkins, White, Van Montford, and Burton's sorting task (Cognition, 2011, Vol.

The flip side of the other-race coin: They all look different to me.

Poorer recognition of other-race faces than own-races faces has been attributed to a problem of discrimination (i.e., telling faces apart).

The effect of familiarity on face adaptation.

Face aftereffects can provide information on how faces are stored by the human visual system (eg Leopold et al, 2001 Nature Neuroscience 4 89-94), but few studies have used robustly represented (highly familiar) faces. In this study we investigated the influence of facial familiarity on adaptation effects. Participants were adapted to a series of distorted faces (their own face, a famous face, or an unfamiliar face).