Abstract
A study is reported of the effect of distinctive marks on the recognition of unfamiliar faces across view angles. Subjects were asked to memorize a set of target faces, half of which had distinctive marks. Recognition was assessed by presenting the target faces, either in the same orientation, or after 90° rotation, mixed with an equal number of distractors. Results show that the effect of distinctive marks depends on the view presented during learning. When a frontal view was learned, as predicted by the dual-strategy model [Valentin et al, in press, in Computational, Geometric, and Process Perspectives on Facial Cognition: Context and Challenges Eds T Wenger, J Townsend (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates)], distinctive marks improve recognition performance in the 90° condition but not in the 0° condition. However, when a profile view was learned, distinctive marks have no effect on recognition performance, even in the 90° condition where a frontal view is tested.