Looking at a Blurry Old Family Photo? Zoom Out!. (January 2014) - Shahangian, Kimeya
We investigated recognition of blurry faces and whether viewing size affects identification of such severely degraded images. Despite the common belief that face perception relies on middle spatial frequencies, the critical spatial frequency band for face recognition is not fixed but rather depends on size. This is especially pronounced at small sizes, where observers choose to utilize lower, rather than middle, frequencies to identify a face. Here we assessed recognition of identity via a novel use of the face adaptation paradigm. We examined face identity aftereffects of blurry and intact adaptors at two sizes. Intact adaptors induced significant aftereffects regardless of size. Small, but not large, blurry adaptors produced aftereffects despite the fact that both contained exactly the same level of facial detail. This suggests an inability to utilize low-frequency information for perceiving identity in large faces. We conclude that (1) size is a key factor in human face recognition processes and (2) coarse facial images are better recognized at small sizes.