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Research on face recognition has mainly relied on methods in which observers are relatively passive viewers of face stimuli. This study investigated whether active exploration of three-dimensional (3D) face stimuli could facilitate recognition memory. A standard recognition task and a sequential matching task were employed in a yoked design. Observers in the active condition explored 3D views of faces via a mouse or joystick during the training and test sessions of the task, whereas observers in the passive condition simply viewed the replay of the same sequence of face stimuli generated by the active observers. It was found that the active condition produced better recognition accuracy than the passive condition. The study provides the first evidence that active exploration of 3D face stimuli can lead to better face recognition memory and matching performance.

The relationship between pose and illumination learning in face recognition was examined in a yes-no recognition paradigm. The authors assessed whether pose training can transfer to a new illumination or vice versa. Results show that an extensive level of pose training through a face-name association task was able to generalize to a new illumination (Experiments 1 and 3), but an equal level of illumination training failed to generalize to a new pose (Experiment 2). The transfer of pose training was likely to depend on a relatively extensive level of training because the same faces with reduced level of exposure (Experiment 4) were unable to reproduce the transfer effect. The findings suggest that generalization of pose training may be extended to different types of image variation, whereas generalization of illumination training may be confined within the trained type of variation.