Viewpoint-dependent recognition of familiar faces

The question whether object representations in the human brain are object-c entered or viewer-centered has motivated a variety of experiments with dive rgent results. A key issue concerns the visual recognition of objects seen from novel views. If recognition performance depends on whether a particula r view has been seen before, it can be interpreted as evidence for a viewer -centered representation. Earlier experiments used unfamiliar objects to pr ovide the experimenter with complete control over the observer's previous e xperience with the object. In this study, we tested whether human recogniti on shows viewpoint dependence for the highly familiar faces of well-known c olleagues and for the observer's own face. We found that observers are poor er at recognizing their own profile, whereas there is no difference in resp onse time between frontal and profile views of other faces. This result sho ws that extensive experience and familiarity with one's own face is not suf ficient to produce viewpoint invariance. Our result provides strong evidenc e for viewer-centered representations in human visual recognition even for highly familiar objects.