Consciousness and Cognition 10, 503–523 (2001) doi:10.1006/ccog.2001.0524, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on Unconscious Familiarity and Local Context Effects on Low-Level Face Processing: A Reconstruction Hypothesis Timothy Montoute 1 and Guy Tiberghien Institut des Sciences Cognitives, UMR 5015 CNRS-VCBL, 67 boulevard Pinel, 69675 Bron, France A common view in face recognition research holds that there is a stored representation specific to each known face. It is also posited that semantic or memory-based information cannot influence low-level face processing. The two experiments reported in this article investigate the nature of this representation and the flow of face information processing. Participants had to search for a particular primed face among other faces. In Experiment 1, the search was done in a context where distractors had either a different degree of fame or the same degree of fame. In Experiment 2, the target face was primed either with semantic information or without any information. Both experiments demonstrated that increasing the display set size lengthened face detection time. However, the lengthening was a function of face fame. The search context also had an effect on the slope of the famous face detection. The results are explained in terms of the idea that face representations are reconstructed and that high- and low-level information are integrated into the processing. The integration process is not a conscious one.  2001 Elsevier Science (USA) Key Words: context; face recognition; bottom-up process; top-down process; memory; face perception; familiarity; visual search; consciousness. INTRODUCTION In daily life, we often deal with situations containing multiple faces, both known and unknown. When looking for a friend in a railway station or in a crowd, we are able to recognize quite accurately and rapidly the person, no matter how many people are in the crowd and how similar their faces are. How is this possible? What mecha- nisms underlying the recognition process allow us to perceive known persons? Why is it that we cannot look at a familiar face and decide not to recognize it? In an attempt to answer these questions, more and more attention is being devoted to face recognition, now a research area of its own. Many of the studies in this field rely on the idea of the domain specificity of face processing (Kanwisher, 1997, 1998; Nach- son, 1995) or they look at the information that was processed for face representation (Burton, Bruce, & Dench, 1993; Rhodes, 1988; Sergent, 1984, 1989; Tanaka & Farah, 1993). Research on the processes underlying face recognition have highlighted a number of issues concerning conscious and unconscious processing in face recogni- tion. One issue concerns the nature of face representations in memory. More specifi- cally, what descriptive information accounts for face representation, categorization, and recognition? The second issue concerns the influence of the visual search context 1 To whom correspondence and reprint requests should be addressed. Fax: (33) 437911210. E-mail: montoute@isc.cnrs.fr. 503 1053-8100/01 $35.00  2001 Elsevier Science (USA) All rights reserved.