Face adaptation: Changing stable representations of familiar faces within minutes?

Three experiments are reported showing that the perception and the assessment of veridicality of familiar faces are highly adaptive to new visual information. Subjects were asked to discriminate between real photographs and altered versions of celebrities. Exposing participants to extremely deviated versions changed the usually stable representations of the famous faces within a very short time. In Experiment 1, exposure to an extreme face version resulted in identity decisions shifted towards the exposed one. Experiment 2 revealed that the effects are not short lasting. In Experiment 3, we showed that the effect also generalizes to different pictures of the same famous person. Together the experiments seem to indicate that the brain permanently adapts to new perceptual information and integrates new data within already elaborated representations in a fast way.