The Cambridge Face Memory Test: Results for neurologically intact individuals and an investigation of its validity using inverted face stimuli and prosopagnosic participants

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Abstract

The two standardized tests of face recognition that are widely used suffer from serious shortcomings [Duchaine, B. & Weidenfeld, A. (2003). An evaluation of two commonly used tests of unfamiliar face recognition. Neuropsychologia, 41, 713–720; Duchaine, B. & Nakayama, K. (2004). Developmental prosopagnosia and the Benton Facial Recognition Test. Neurology, 62, 1219–1220]. Images in the Warrington Recognition Memory for Faces test include substantial non-facial information, and the simultaneous presentation of faces in the Benton Facial Recognition Test allows feature matching. Here, we present results from a new test, the Cambridge Face Memory Test, which builds on the strengths of the previous tests. In the test, participants are introduced to six target faces, and then they are tested with forced choice items consisting of three faces, one of which is a target. For each target face, three test items contain views identical to those studied in the introduction, five present novel views, and four present novel views with noise. There are a total of 72 items, and 50 controls averaged 58. To determine whether the test requires the special mechanisms used to recognize upright faces, we conducted two experiments. We predicted that controls would perform much more poorly when the face images are inverted, and as predicted, inverted performance was much worse with a mean of 42. Next we assessed whether eight prosopagnosics would perform poorly on the upright version. The prosopagnosic mean was 37, and six prosopagnosics scored outside the normal range. In contrast, the Warrington test and the Benton test failed to classify a majority of the prosopagnosics as impaired. These results indicate that the new test effectively assesses face recognition across a wide range of abilities.

Section snippets

Stimuli

The faces are those of men in their 20s and early 30s, and each individual was photographed in the same range of poses and lighting conditions. Men's faces were used, because men and women perform equivalently with men's faces whereas women show an advantage with women's faces (Lewin & Herlitz, 2002; McKelvie, 1987, McKelvie et al., 1993). All faces were cropped so that no hair was visible and facial blemishes were removed. The men posed with neutral expressions.

Six individuals were chosen as

Results

In this section, we discuss the results from our normal participants. Following this, we discuss two conditions aimed at determining whether our test effectively measures face recognition. We do this by first administering the test when all faces are presented inverted, and by giving the test in its upright version to prosopagnosic individuals.

Discussion

We created a new test of face memory in hopes that it can supplement standardized tests of face recognition. The results discussed in the previous section are very encouraging. Fig. 8 displays performance on the three sections of the test for the three conditions. First consider the upright percent correct. Because these scores are far off of the floor and the ceiling, the test can assess a wide range of abilities. Each of the top five possible scores (68–72) was achieved by only one

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