Abstract
We investigated the visual information used to recognize human head from a variety of viewpoints. Subjects' task was to identify three familiar people from five different views (from the frontal face to the back of the head in steps of 45°). The mean reaction time (RT) was not affected with changing head angles when the image was original face version. RT significantly decreased when the images contained in high spatial frequency (SF) component. Moreover, there was an effective SF range in recognition from each viewpoint, which was the middle range far the frontal face and the higher range for the back of the head. For the profile, there was no change in RT across the ranges of SF. These results suggest that different view-specific information was used on each view for identification, and the recognition of the profile might be unique on familiar face processing.
