Abstract
These experiments addressed why, in episodic-memory tests, familiar faces are recognized better than unfamiliar faces. Memory for faces of well-known public figures and unfamiliar persons was tested, not only with old/new recognition tests, in which initially viewed faces were discriminated from dis tractors, but also with tests of memory for specific information. These included: detail recall, in which a masked feature had to be described; orientation recognition, in which discrimination between originally seen faces and mirror-image reversals was required; and recognition and recall of labels for the public figures. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that memory for orientation and featural details was not robustly related either to facial familiarity or to old/new recognition rates. Experiment 3 showed that memory for labels was not the exclusive determinant of the famous-face advantage in recognition, since famous faces were highly recognizable even they were not labelable or when labels were forgotten. These results suggest that the familiarity effect, and face recognition in general, may reflect a nonverbal memory representation that is relatively abstract.
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This research was supported by NIMH Grant 25090 to the first author.
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Klatzky, R.L., Forrest, F.H. Recognizing familiar and unfamiliar faces. Memory & Cognition 12, 60–70 (1984). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196998
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196998