Perceptual adaptation helps us identify faces

Adaptation is a fundamental property of perceptual processing. In low-level vision, it can calibrate perception to current inputs, increasing coding efficiency and enhancing discrimination around the adapted level. Adaptation also occurs in high-level vision, as illustrated by face aftereffects. However, the functional consequences of face adaptation remain uncertain. Here we investigated whether adaptation can enhance identification performance for faces from an adapted, relative to an unadapted, population. Five minutes of adaptation to an average Asian or Caucasian face reduced identification thresholds for faces from the adapted relative to the unadapted race. We replicated this interaction in two studies, using different participants, faces and adapting procedures. These results suggest that adaptation has a functional role in high-level, as well as low-level, visual processing. We suggest that adaptation to the average of a population may reduce responses to common properties shared by all members of the population, effectively orthogonalizing identity vectors in a multi-dimensional face space and freeing neural resources to code distinctive properties, which are useful for identification.