Fig. 4. From Non-Familiar Face Recognition to Person Knowledge.

a. Forty face images, unfamiliar to most, which subjects had to sort by identity (Jenkins & Burton 2011). Although the array includes 20 images of two individuals each, subjects sorted them into an average of seven identities. Subjects familiar with the two individuals successfully sorted the images to two identities. These results demonstrate the challenge of generalizing across different images of the same person for unfamiliar faces.

b. A single neuron in the medial temporal lobe of an epilepsy patient exhibiting robust responses to a wide range of images of actress Halle Barry, including images in which her face is completely masked, and even her name written in letters (Quiroga et al 2005). The response profile demonstrates that non-face related knowledge (i.e. knowledge about the movie she appeared in with this mask, knowledge of her name) shaped the response of this neuron, thus generating a highly invariant person representation beyond the representations that can be obtain from vision alone.