High familiar faces have both eyes recognition and holistic processing advantages

People recognize familiar faces better than unfamiliar faces (Burton & Jenkins, 2012). However, it remains elusive whether this familiarity advantage is supported by part-based and/or holistic processing. Wang and colleagues (2015, 2019) found both enhanced part-based and holistic processing in eye relative to mouth regions (i.e., in a region-selective manner) for own-race and own-species faces, i.e., faces with more experience. In this study, we examined the roles of eyes (part-based, region-selective) and holistic processing in the face familiarity effect. Face familiarity was tested at three levels: high-familiar (faces of students from the same department and the same grade who almost always attended all courses together), low-familiar (faces of students from the same department but different grades who attended some courses together), and unfamiliar (faces of schoolmates from different departments who seldom attended the same courses). Using an old/new task in Experiment 1, we found that participants recognized eyes from high-familiar faces better than low-familiar and unfamiliar ones, but not for mouths, indicating a region-selective, eyes familiarity effect. Using the “Perceptual field” Paradigm (Van Belle et al., 2015) in Experiment 2, we observed a strong inversion effect for high-familiar faces, a weaker inversion effect for low-familiar faces, but non-significant inversion effect for unfamiliar faces, indicating that holistic processing plays a role in face familiarity effect. Taken together, our results demonstrated that familiarity, like other experience-based variables (e.g., race and species), can improve both eyes processing and holistic processing, suggesting eyes processing play a role in face holistic processing.