ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the issue of how the natural structure of faces – as indexed by people's judgements of facial typicality – comes to affect the judgements. It argues that the effects of natural structure of faces are mediated by two components, memorability and general familiarity, functioning in opposition. The chapter discusses how these two components can be seen to underlie the effects of rated typicality and rated attractiveness on the discrimination of specific familiarity on face recognition. The idea of inter-item similarity is inherent in the construct of 'distinctiveness', an earlier proposed basis for the mediation of categorical structure on face recognition. If the categorical structure of faces is mediated by general familiarity and memorability in people's judgements about faces, then these two components should be latent in the relationships among the judgements across faces. The chapter demonstrates the utility and generality of a two-component model of the effects of natural structure on the recognition of faces.
