A new model for the visual judgement of kinship

We analyse three different visual judgements of human faces: kinship, similarity and dissimilarity. The accepted model that represents the relation between similarity and kinship is one in which notional kinship signals are detected by the human observer in order to judge both kinship and similarity of pairs of faces. We measure observers' response times to face-pair stimuli while they perform judgements of kinship, similarity or dissimilarity. Significant differences in response time are found between the three different tasks and between face-pair categories - suggesting that the strategies employed when extracting information from facial features, may be conditional on both task and stimulus context. We sketch a new model for face processing related to these three judgements.