Previous research has shown that direct gaze elicits more hits than deviated gaze in face recognition tasks. The aim of the present study was to evaluate whether the state of awareness that accompanied recognition was different for faces with eye gaze directed toward the observer as compared with faces looking elsewhere. This state of awareness was assessed using the "Remember-Know-Guess" paradigm. Three different experiments were conducted including, respectively, 24 (12 women, 12 men), 24 (12 women, 12 men), and 28 (15 women, 13 men) volunteer participants ages 18 to 31 (M1 = 20.8, SD1 = 2.8; M2 = 20.7, SD2 = 2.4; M3 = 21.5, SD3 = 3.6). Experiments comprised two incidental learning experiments using, respectively, frontal views and profile views of faces at encoding, and one intentional learning experiment using profile views of faces at encoding. Surprisingly, the effect of direct gaze observed in previous studies was not replicated. The rates of Hits were not significantly higher for faces showing direct gaze than for faces with deviated gaze across the three experiments. However, in the intentional learning experiment, rates of Remember responses were significantly higher in the direct gaze than in the deviated gaze condition.

Capgras delusion is characterized by the misidentification of people and by the delusional belief that the misidentified persons have been replaced by impostors, generally perceived as persecutors. Since little is known regarding the neural correlates of Capgras syndrome, the cerebral metabolic pattern of a patient with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Capgras syndrome was compared with those of 24-healthy elderly participants and 26 patients with AD without delusional syndrome. Comparing the healthy group with the AD group, the patient with AD had significant hypometabolism in frontal and posterior midline structures. In the light of current neural models of face perception, our patients with Capgras syndrome may be related to impaired recognition of a familiar face, subserved by the posterior cingulate/precuneus cortex, and impaired reflection about personally relevant knowledge related to a face, subserved by the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex.

This study was aimed at determining the conditions in which eye-contact may improve recognition memory for faces. Different stimuli and procedures were tested in four experiments. The effect of gaze direction on memory was found when a simple "yes-no" recognition task was used but not when the recognition task was more complex (e.g., including "Remember-Know" judgements, cf. Experiment 2, or confidence ratings, cf. Experiment 4). Moreover, even when a "yes-no" recognition paradigm was used, the effect occurred with one series of stimuli (cf. Experiment 1) but not with another one (cf. Experiment 3). The difficulty to produce the positive effect of gaze direction on memory is discussed.

Previous studies have shown that people's ability to detect, from memory, alterations in highly familiar faces is excellent. Indeed, just noticeable differences for the detection of small alterations in a recognition-memory task were not significantly different from the corresponding measures in a perceptual-discrimination task (Brédart and Devue, 2006 Perception 35 101-106; Ge et al, 2003 Perception 32 601-614). The object of the present study was to evaluate whether people's perceptual memory for body shapes of very familiar persons reaches the high level of precision that was reported for face memory. For one group of participants, the task was to detect body shape alterations (an increase or a decrease of 2% to 10% of the waist-to-hip ratio) on photographs depicting either themselves or a friend. For another group of participants who did not know the target persons, the task was to discriminate whether two photographs presented side by side were the same or not. Results showed that the detection of alterations was significantly better in the perceptual-discrimination task than in the recognition-memory tasks (for the participant's own body as well as for the friend's body). In conclusion, the high fidelity of perceptual memory for very familiar faces does not extend to familiar body shapes.