Verbal Facilitation of Face Recognition

Charity Brown & Toby J. Lloyd-Jones

University of Kent

Research supported by ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship T026-27-1240 to Charity Brown, and ESRC research grant RES000-23-0057 to Toby J. Lloyd-Jones

Verbal overshadowing of face recognition

• Describing a previously seen face can interfere with subsequent recognition of that same face (Schooler & Engstler-Schooler, 1990)

• Verbal overshadowing is not limited to the described stimulus

Describing a single face impairs later recognition of a number of both faces and cars (Brown & Lloyd-Jones, 2003)

Verbal facilitation of face recognition

• Studies have shown positive effects of verbally recoding

visual stimuli upon subsequent memory performance

• Providing faces with elaborative verbal information at

encoding benefits recognition (e.g. Bower & Karlin, 1974)

descriptionvs. no

description(15 seconds)

Study Phase Recognition Test

12 faces presented at study

Exp 1: Describing each face in a series

old/new decision

12 study faces mixed with 12 new faces

2 seconds

2 seconds

Description

Mean (SD)

No Description

Mean (SD)

1.18 (.53) .94 (.61)

Exp 1: Describing each face in a series

Recognition Accuracy (d’)

descriptionvs. no

description(15 seconds)

Study Phase Recognition Test

12 pairs of faces presented at study

Exp 2: Describing target faces in a series

old/new decision

24 study faces mixed with 24 new faces

non-target1st face

target2nd face

non-target1st face

target2nd face

0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1

1.2

Non-target Target

Acc

urac

y (d

')

Description

No Description

Exp 2: Describing target faces in a series

1st face 2nd face

Exp 2: Item-specific retroactive interference?

• Trace strength Strength of the memory may be greater for the 2nd face because it is more recent

• Blocking The 2nd face may steal activation from the 1st face or be sampled in its place

Exp 2: Summary

• Verbal facilitation arose for faces that were described but not for faces that were not described

• Alternatively, verbalization influenced item-specific retroactive interference

0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1

1.2

Similarities Differences

Acc

ura

cy (

d')

Description

No Description

Exp 3: Describing similarities and differences

0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1

1.2

Featural Holistic

Acc

ura

cy (

d')

Description

No Description

Exp 4: Describing featural vs. holistic aspects of each face

• Verbalizing a memory of a single face or the relationship between pairs of faces benefited recognition (Exp 1, 3, 4)

• Some evidence that facilitative effects of verbalization may be tied to the stimulus described (Exp 2)

• The nature of the description does not appear to be a strong determinant of verbal facilitation (Exp 3, 4)

Exp1 – 4: Summary

Verbal facilitation or a negative effect of distractor activity?

Conclusions 1

• Distractor tasks were very different from the task of learning faces

• Participants adopted a more conservative criterion in the no description condition

• There was some evidence of an association between description quality and recognition performance

• Feature quantity account (Winograd, 1981)

• Holistic account (Wells & Hryciw, 1984)

• Semantic processing account (Anderson & Reder, 1979)

Conclusions 2

Sources of facilitation

• Relationship between description and study faces

• Amount of verbalization

Conclusion 3

Facilitation vs. interference