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The identity information that is carried by faces allows us to recognize the people around us, thereby providing fundamental structure to our interpersonal interactions. In the eye of the beholder, this facial identity information is carried on a continuum (see Clutterbuck & Johnston, 2002, 2004). At one end of this continuum are the faces of unfamiliar people, whom we have seen only briefly—perhaps in only a single photograph. At the other end of this continuum lies the recognition of highly familiar people, such as family, friends, and colleagues, or famous people to whose faces we are exposed extensively through various media. These familiar faces were, of course, at some point also unfamiliar to an observer. And, as the people who are familiar to one person are inevitably unfamiliar to someone else, both familiar and unfamiliar face recognition can be performed on exactly the same visual stimuli (see, e.g., Armann, Jenkins, & Burton, 2016; Ritchie et al., 2015). In this sense, familiar and unfamiliar face processing are clearly linked. However, increasing familiarity with a face exerts a transformational effect on the cognitive representations that underpin this process. As a consequence, the identification of unfamiliar and familiar faces is characterized by different properties (for reviews, see Hancock, Bruce, & Burton, 2000; Johnston & Edmonds, 2009). To illustrate, familiar faces can be recognized quickly and accurately (see, e.g., Bruce, Carson, Burton, & Kelly, 1998; Bruce & Valentine, 1985), and over intervals of many years (Bahrick, Bahrick, & Wittlinger, 1975). They can also be recognized without conscious awareness (Morrison, Bruce, & Burton, 2000) or explicit memory (Jenkins, Burton, & Ellis, 2002), in the visual periphery (Bindemann, Burton, & Jenkins, 2005; Bindemann, Jenkins, & Burton, 2007), and from partial (Brunas, Young, & Ellis, 1990; Johnston, Barry, & Williams, 1996), degraded (Demanet, Dhont, Notebaert, Pattyn, & Vandierendonck, 2007; Lander, Bruce, & Hill, 2001), and distorted images (Bindemann, Burton, Leuthold, & Schweinberger, 2008; Hole, George, Eaves, & Rasek, 2002). The sum of evidence therefore suggests that the recognition of familiar faces is remarkably robust, even under challenging conditions. By contrast, unfamiliar face identification is highly error-prone, even under seemingly good conditions. When observers are asked to identify a target face out of a concurrent lineup of ten possible matches, accuracy is typically at approximately 70% (Bruce et al., 1999; Bruce, Henderson, Newman, & Burton, 2001). Performance remains error-prone when this task is reduced to a simple pairwise comparison, in which observers decide whether two faces side-byside depict the same person or different people (e.g., Bindemann, Avetisyan, & Rakow, 2012; Burton, White, & McNeill, 2010). This pattern is observed with high-quality images that depict the compared faces in the same frontal view, with a neutral expression, and under good lighting. Moreover, this difficulty is not restricted to photographs, but persists when observers match a person seen live to a face photograph (Kemp, Towell, & Pike, 1997; Megreya & Burton, 2008; White, Kemp, Jenkins, Matheson, & Burton, 2014) or moving video images (Davis & Valentine, 2009). Thus, unfamiliar face identification appears to be difficult even under optimized conditions. These differences between familiar and unfamiliar face processing are striking, and the process of the transition from an unfamiliar face to a familiar one—

Understanding how Unfamiliar Faces Become Familiar: Introduction to a Special Issue on Face Learning