Learning facilitates dual-process face recognition regardless of holistic processing

Much evidence suggests that faces are recognized based on their global familiarity in a signal-detection manner. However, experiments drawing this conclusion typically present study lists of faces only once or twice, and the nature of face recognition at higher levels of learning remains unclear. Here, three experiments are reported in which participants studied some faces eight times and others twice and then took a recognition test containing previously viewed faces, entirely new faces, and faces which recombined the parts of previously viewed faces. Three measures converged to suggest that study list repetition increased the likelihood of participants rejecting recombined faces as new by recollecting that their parts were studied but in a different combination, and that manipulating holistic or Gestalt-like processing—a hallmark of face perception—qualitatively preserved its effect on how memory judgments are made. This suggests that face learning causes a shift from the use of a signal-detection strategy to the use of a dual-process strategy of face recognition regardless of holistic processing.