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.

The question of how sensory information is encoded and integrated for goal-directed movements is a major topic in action research. Here we studied the influence of the direction of gaze on a task in which healthy individuals were required to point to their own unseen fingertip. An effect of the position of gaze on pointing, leading to pointing errors in the direction opposite to the gaze position, was obtained in the range of 11° but vanished for 22°. These results suggest that targets of aiming movements performed with an unseen arm may be encoded in retinal coordinates even when the target is encoded in a nonvisual modality and remains unseen.