The ability to recognize identity despite within‐person variability in appearance is likely a face‐specific skill and shaped by experience. Ensemble coding – the automatic extraction of the average of a stimulus array – has been proposed as a mechanism underlying face learning (allowing one to recognize novel instances of a newly learned face). We investigated whether ensemble encoding, like face learning and recognition, is refined by experience by testing participants with upright own‐race faces and two categories of faces with which they lacked experience: other‐race faces (Experiment 1) and inverted faces (Experiment 2). Participants viewed four images of an unfamiliar identity and then were asked whether a test image of that same identity had been in the study array. Each test image was a matching exemplar (from the array), matching average (the average of the images in the array), non‐matching exemplar (a novel image of the same identity), or non‐matching average (an average of four different images of the same identity). Adults showed comparable ensemble coding for all three categories (i.e., reported that matching averages had been present more than non‐matching averages), providing evidence that this early stage of face learning is not shaped by face‐specific experience.

中文翻译：

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无法通过经验完善面部识别的整体编码：来自其他种族和倒立面孔的证据

尽管人脸外观存在差异，但仍能够识别身份的能力可能是特定于面部的技能，并由经验决定。集成编码（一种刺激阵列平均值的自动提取）已被提议作为面部学习的基础机制（允许人们识别新近学习的面部的新颖实例）。我们研究了通过测试参与者直立的自种面孔和两类他们缺乏经验的面孔，是否通过体验改进了整体编码，例如其他种族的面孔（实验1）和倒立的面孔（实验2） ）。参与者查看了四个陌生身份的图像，然后被询问研究阵列中是否存在相同身份的测试图像。每个测试图像都是一个匹配的示例（来自数组），匹配平均值（阵列中图像的平均值），不匹配示例（相同身份的新图像）或不匹配平均值（相同身份的四张不同图像的平均值）。成年人在所有三个类别上都表现出可比的整体编码（即，报告的相符平均数比不相符的平均数要多），提供了证据表明面部学习的这一早期阶段不受特定于面部的经验的影响。