Face matching and change detection

Although we have an excellent ability to recognise familiar faces, even when presented in low-quality pictures, people are really poor at matching unfamiliar faces, even when presented in high-quality images, Here, we attempt to predict unfamiliar face matching performance by a face change detection task. Detecting changes in the eyes, regardless of whether they were featural or configurational, was the best predictor, provided that tragets were presented in a full-face frontal view, but not in a profile pose. More importantly, we found strong positive associations between featural and configurational processing, suggesting that similar processes are in use, We conclude that configurational information cannot be processed without encoding featural information in the first place.