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It is widely accepted that face perception relies on holistic processing. However, this holistic advantage is not always found in the processing of the own face. Our study aimed to explore the role of holistic and featural processing in the identification of the own face, using three standard, but largely independent measures of holistic face processing: the face inversion task, the composite face task, and the part-whole task. Participants were asked to identify their face, a friend’s face, and an unfamiliar face in three different experimental blocks: (a) inverted versus upright; (b) top and bottom halves of the face aligned versus misaligned; and (c) facial features presented in isolation versus whole foil face context. Inverting a face impaired its identification, regardless of the identity. However, alignment effects were only found when identifying a friend or an unfamiliar face. In addition, a stronger feature advantage (i.e., better recognition for isolated features compared to in a whole-face context) was observed for the own face compared to the friend and unfamiliar faces. Altogether, these findings suggest that the own face is processed in a more featural manner but also relies on holistic processing. This work also highlights the importance of taking into consideration that different holistic processing paradigms could tap different forms of holistic processing.

While a change in view is considered to be one of the most damaging manipulations for facial identification, this phenomenon has been measured traditionally with tasks that confound perceptual processes with recognition memory. This study explored facial identification with a pairwise matching task to determine whether view generalization is possible when memory factors are minimised. Experiment 1 showed that the detrimental view effect in recognition memory is attenuated in face matching. Moreover, analysis of individual differences revealed that some observers can identify faces across view with perfect accuracy. This was replicated in Experiment 2, which also showed that view generalization is unaffected when only the internal facial features are shown. These results indicate that the view effect in recognition memory does not arise from data limits, whereby faces contain insufficient visual information to allow identification across views. Instead, these findings point to resource limits, within observers, that hamper such person identification in recognition memory.