The accuracy of perceptual memory for personally known faces

Recently, Ge et al. (2003) reported a very high accuracy of memory for a highly familiar face. Their Chinese participants had to identify the most veridical appearance of Mao’s face among unaltered and transformed (inter-ocular distance was gradually increased or decreased) versions of his portrait. In the present experiment, the same facial transformations were applied to our participants’ faces to evaluate whether this hyperfidelity for familiar faces is specific to famous individuals whose face is mainly known from a standard portrait or if it could generalise to personally known faces (the own face and a close person’s face). Results showed that performance was not different for the two familiar faces in the recognition task, or between the recognition task and a perceptual discrimination task. The high accuracy of memory previously shown for a very famous face generalises to personally known individuals for whom we have a various visual experience.