Canonical views of faces and the cerebral hemispheres

Evidence is given for a special, canonical, status of one specific view in the identification of familiar faces. In the first experiment, subjects ide ntified by name the fully frontal or profile poses of briefly familiarised individuals less efficiently than an intermediate pose. In addition, in a m atching experiment using faces seen in different poses, it was found that o ne specific intermediate pose (corresponding to 22.5 degrees of angle from the full frontal view) was matched more efficiently in the right visual fie ld (RVF) than in the left visual field (LVF). This finding supports the hyp othesis of a superiority of the left hemisphere (LH) over the right hemisph ere (RH) in processing a familiar face's canonical view. The other tested " noncanonical'' views (i.e., full frontal, 45 degrees, and profile) of these same familiar faces were better matched in the LVF (i.e., the RH); especia lly at low levels of familiarity. We conclude that, for each familiar face, a viewer-centred representation of the canonical (22.5 degrees) view is st ored in the LH's memory system, whereas multiple views of familiar faces ar e stored in a memory system of the RH. With increasing levels of familiarit y other views are increasingly more efficiently encoded by the LH, and in f act for facial self-recognition the full-front view is superior to any of t he other tested views. These findings taken together suggest that complemen tary lateralised memory subsystems in the two cerebral hemispheres store di fferent sets, only partially overlapping, of view-centred face representati ons.