Someone Like You? Modelling Face Memory Reveals Task-generalizable Representations

Current theories of cognition are cast in terms of information processing mechanisms that use mental representations. For example, consider the mechanisms of face identification that use mental representations to identify familiar faces under various conditions of pose, illumination and ageing, or to draw resemblance between family members. Providing an explanation of these information processing mechanisms thus relies on showing how the actual information contents of these representations are used. Yet, these representational contents are rarely characterized, which in turn hinders knowledge of mechanisms. Here, we address this pervasive gap by characterizing the detailed contents of mental representations of familiar faces using a new methodological approach. We used a unique generative model of face identity information combined with perceptual judgments and reverse correlation to model the 3D representational contents of 4 familiar faces in 14 participants. We then demonstrated the validity of these contents using everyday perceptual tasks that generalize face identity and resemblance judgments to new viewpoints, age and sex with a new group of participants. Our work highlights that such models of mental representations are critical to understanding generalization behavior and for characterizing the information processing mechanisms that must use them.