Abstract
We found that briefly flashed pictures of a face were detected more accurately than was a control pattern with a nose, a mouth, and a pair of eyes positioned arbitrarily so that they did not form a face. It has been known for some time that a face, as an organized set of features, is remembered more easily than is any one of its isolated features. Our results show that the perceptual superiority of faces extends to detection tasks, in which there is no need to remember any aspect of the face.
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Purcell, D.G., Stewart, A.L. The face-detection effect. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 24, 118–120 (1986). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03330521
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03330521