Three-Quarter Views of Depth-Rotated Faces Induce Face-Specific Capacity Limits in Visual Search.

Participants made speeded categorization decisions regarding a famous person (politician or film star) accompanied by a peripheral distracter face (either the same or from the opposite category). The first experiment found that processing a peripheral distracter face is independent of load when the search set contains name strings. The search set in the second experiment consisted of faces. Interference effects between the target and distracter face (both shown in frontal views) were found when no additional non-target faces were present (low load), but not when two non-famous faces (high load) accompanied the target face, even when the latter were shown in three-quarter views. These results indicate that face-specific capacity limitations are independent of changes in view (up to 45 degrees) and gaze direction.