The illusion of distinctiveness

Data collected in a recent control study suggest that the more we know someone’s face, the more we find it distinctive, that is different from other faces. For example, Kit Harrington’s face (aka Jon Snow) is probably not that special, and yet, due to his title role in Game of Thrones, fans of the show may find his face distinctive, more so than people who have not seen the show. Ratings of familiarity and distinctiveness obtained on unfamiliar faces do not show such positive association. High distinctiveness ratings on well-known faces might thus reflect an illusion of distinctiveness—a subjective impression that does not match the objective distinctiveness of a given face’s features. Such illusion, making objective distinctiveness ratings difficult to obtain, could be problematic for building well-controlled materials to study familiar face recognition, the impact of distinctiveness itself or individual differences in face recognition abilities. To objectify this phenomenon and test if it can be mitigated, we examined the links between familiarity and distinctiveness ratings obtained from full headshots of celebrities and between familiarity and compound distinctiveness ratings calculated from ratings on four different isolated facial parts. Isolating facial parts is known to disrupt facial recognition, and so ratings of isolated parts should be less influenced by familiarity than ratings of headshots. We will discuss possible causes for that phenomenon in terms of representational weights assigned to diagnostic features in individual faces and implications for future research on distinctiveness and familiar face recognition in general.