The utility of surface reflectance for the recognition of upright and inverted faces

The variation among faces can be partitioned into two sources: (a) shape and (b) surface reflectance. To compare the utility of shape and reflectance for face recognition, we created two sets of faces, with individual exemplars differing only by shape in one set and only by reflectance in the other set. Grayscale and full color versions of the stimuli were used in separate experiments; the physical variation between exemplars was equated across the two sets with the grayscale but not the full color stimuli. Subjects performed a matching task in which both the target and distractor were drawn from the same set, so that only shape or only reflectance information could be used to perform the task. With the grayscale stimuli, performance was better in the shape condition, but with the color stimuli, performance was better in the reflectance condition. Inversion of the faces disrupted performance with the shape and reflectance sets about equally, suggesting that the inversion effect is not caused specifically by the spacing of facial features, or even by shape information more generally. These results provide evidence that facial identity is a function of reflectance as well as shape, and place important constraints on explanations of why inversion impairs face recognition.