Repetition priming of face recognition

Three experiments investigating the priming of the recognition of familiar faces are reported. In Experiment 1, recognizing the face of a celebrity in an “Is this face familiar?” task was primed by exposure several minutes earlier to a different photograph of the same person, but not by exposure to the person's written name (a partial replication of Bruce and Valentine, 1985). In Experiment 2, recognizing the face of a personal acquaintance was again primed by recognizing a different photograph of their face, but not by recognizing the acquaintance from that person's body shape, clothes etc. Experiment 3 showed that maximum repetition priming is obtained from prior exposure to an identical photograph of a famous face, less from a similar photograph, and least (but still significant) from a dissimilar photograph.

We argue that repetition priming is a function of the degree of physical similarity between two stimuli and that lack of priming between different stimulus types (e.g., written names and faces, or bodies and faces) may be attributable to lack of physical similarity between prime and test stimuli. Repetition priming effects may be best explained by some form of “instance-based” model such as that proposed by McClelland and Rumelhart (1985).     

Asymmetries in face processing: Evidence for a right hemisphere perceptual advantage

Investigation of lateral performance asymmetries in the early stages of face processing was conducted using a task which avoided the need either to memorise or to compare two faces. Subjects were merely required to decide whether or not a laterally presented stimulus constituted a face. Analysis of the latencies indicated a LVF advantage for this task which is interpreted, in conjunction with the evidence from patients suffering from prosopagnosia, as indicating a right hemisphere superiority in synthesizing facial percepts.     

Serial position memory in the visual—spatial domain: Reconstructing sequences of unfamiliar faces

In two studies we presented pictures of unfamiliar faces one at a time, then presented the complete set at test and asked for serial reconstruction of the order of presentation. Serial position functions were similar to those found with verbal materials, with considerable primacy and one item recency, position errors that were mainly to the adjacent serial position, a visual similarity effect, and effects of articulatory suppression that did not interact with the serial position effect or with the similarity effect. Serial position effects were found when faces had been seen for as little as 300 ms and after a 6-s retention interval filled with articulatory suppression. Serial position effects found with unfamiliar faces are not based on verbal encoding strategies, and important elements of serial memory may be general across modalities.     

Routes through the face recognition system

Two experiments are reported which seek to examine the proposition first put forward by Hay and Young (1982), that recognition of a known person after seeing his or her face proceeds through a series of sequentially organized stages. In both experiments subjects were shown a selection of famous and unfamiliar faces and required to state whether each face was familiar. They were then asked to recall semantic information and the person's name. Of all the possible response types, only some are predicted by models derived from Hay and Young (1982), and only these responses were observed in Experiment 1. In order to give as complete an account as possible of the slips and errors made by subjects, they were interrogated some days after completing the testing phase in Experiment 2. As in the first experiment, the results supported the view that distinct but successive stages are involved in everyday face recognition. The method developed here provides an extension of the “diary” type of study of everyday recognition errors into laboratory conditions, which confirms the findings of studies of everyday errors and provides strong support for sequential models.