Part and whole face representations in immediate and long-term memory.

Part and whole face representations in immediate and long-term memory. Vision Res. 2019 Oct 01;164:53-61 Authors: Tanaka JW, Heptonstall B, Campbell A Abstract Although there is empricial support for the old adage that "we never forget a face" (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 104 (1975) 54-75), the cognitive processes responsible for our long-term face memories are not well understood. By manipulating the upright and inverted orientation of faces during encoding and retrieval, we investigated the influence of holistic processing on our ability to recognize faces stored in long-term memory. In Experiment 1, participants were trained to identify 12 novel upright faces (six male, six female) by name (e.g., "Joe," "Sue") to a criterion of 100% accuracy. Following learning, holistic memory for the upright and inverted faces was tested using the parts/wholes face recognition task. Different groups of participants were tested either immediately, one week, or two weeks after learning. A significant holistic effect was found for faces tested in their original upright orientation that was stable over the immediate, one-week, and two-week testing periods. In contrast, recognition of the same faces when shown inverted was poor and showed no evidence of holistic processing. In Experiment 2, faces were learned in their inverted orientations with 100% accuracy and tested in their upright and inverted orientations. At the immediate, one-...
Source: Vision Research - Category: Opthalmology Authors: Tags: Vision Res Source Type: research