Toward a comprehensive test battery for face cognition: Assessment of the tasks

Despite the importance of face recognition in everyday life and frequent complaints about its failure, there is no comprehensive test battery for this ability. As a first step in constructing such a battery, we present 18 tasks aimed at measuring face perception, face learning, face recognition, and the recognition of facially expressed emotions. A sample of 153 healthy young adults completed all tasks. In general, reaction time measures showed high estimates of internal consistency; tasks focused on performance accuracy yielded reliabilities that were somewhat lower, yet high enough to support their use in a battery of face cognition measures. Some of the tasks allowed computation of established experimental effects in a within-subjects design, such as the part-whole effect. Most of these experimental effects were confirmed in our large sample, and valuable effect size estimates were obtained. However, in many cases these difference measures showed poor estimates of internal consistency.     

Satisficing in financial decision making — a theoretical and experimental approach to bounded rationality

We apply the theoretical construct of bounded rationality to an investment game, allowing participants to invest their monetary endowment in riskless bonds and risky assets. In our experiment, we elicit aspiration levels from participants: one captures a subsistence threshold, the other a success threshold. Participants can be classified according to these aspirations and the corresponding investment behavior. We differentiate between potential and actual satisficing. By presupposing specific cardinal utility functions, we also relate the bounded rationality approach to the traditional rational choice model.     

Emotions in Go/NoGo conflicts

On the basis of current emotion theories and functional and neurophysiological ties between the processing of conflicts and errors on the one hand and errors and emotions on the other hand we predicted that conflicts between prepotent Go responses and occasional NoGo trials in the Go/NoGo task would induce emotions. Skin conductance responses (SCRs), corrugator muscle activity, and startle blink responses were measured in three experiments requiring speeded Go responses intermixed with NoGo trials of different relative probability and in a choice reaction experiment serving as a control. NoGo trials affected several of these emotion-sensitive indicators as SCRs and startle blinks were reduced whereas corrugator activity was prolonged as compared to Go trials. From the pattern of findings we suggest that NoGo conflicts are not aversive. Instead, they appear to be appraised as obstructive for the response goal and as less action relevant than Go trials.     

I recognize your face, but I can't remember your name: A question of expertise?

In four experiments on the identification of familiar faces we reassessed a robust performance pattern—namely, the temporal advantage for retrieving biographical facts as compared to recalling proper names, which has been interpreted as reflecting a serial ordering of the access to semantic and name information. Evidence for recent parallel accounts had been provided by Scanlan and Johnston (1997) who reported an advantage for name retrieval in children. Here we replicated the findings of Scanlan and Johnston but also showed that the naming advantage disappears, and performance is very similar to that of adults when stimuli and tasks are used that are familiar to children. Conversely, we also demonstrated an advantage for name retrieval in adults when highly unfamiliar semantic facts were associated with the faces. Together these findings suggest that there is no fundamental difference in the cognitive architectures of children and adults. The experiments indicate that the relative speed of naming and semantic fact retrieval depends on the expertise with the semantic facts to be retrieved. Implications for models of face identification and naming are discussed.     

Book reviews

The Tao and the Logos: Literary Hermeneutics, East and West. Zhang Longxi, 1992 Duke University Press xviii + 239 pp., ISBN 0 8223 1218 2, pb $14.50

Ibn Sinā and Mysticism: Remarks and Admonitions. Shams C. Inati, 1996, London, Kegan Paul International, 114 pp., ISBN 0 7103 0482 X, hb £30.00

Ethics in Early Buddhism. David J. Kalupahana, 1995, Hawaii, University of Hawaii Press, ix+ 171 pp., ISBN 0 8248 1702 8, hb $27.00

On Understanding Buddhists. Essays on Theravāda Tradition in Sri Lanka. John Ross Carter, 1993, Albany, State University of New York Press, xiv+215 pp, hb $16.95

To See the Buddha. A Philosopher's Quest for the Meaning of Emptiness. Malcolm David Eckel, 1994 (1st edn 1992), Princeton, Princeton University Press, x + 262 pp., ISBN 0 691 03773 6, pb US$ 16.95