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Abstract

People are good at recognising faces, particularly familiar faces. However, little is known about how precisely familiar faces are represented and how increasing familiarity improves the precision of face representation. Here we investigated the precision of face representation for two types of familiar faces: personally familiar faces (i.e. faces of colleagues) and visually familiar faces (i.e. faces learned from viewing photographs). For each familiar face, participants were asked to select the original face among an array of faces, which varied from highly caricatured (þ50) to highly anticaricatured (50) along the facial shape dimension. We found that for personally familiar faces, participants selected the original faces more often than any other faces. In contrast, for visually familiar faces, the highly anti-caricatured (50) faces were selected more often than others, including the original faces. Participants also favoured anti-caricatured faces more than caricatured faces for both types of familiar faces. These results indicate that people form very precise representation for personally familiar faces, but not for visually familiar faces. Moreover, the more familiar a face is, the more its corresponding representation shifts from a region close to the average face (i.e. anti-caricatured) to its veridical location in the face space.