Component structure of individual differences in true and false recognition of faces.

Abstract

Principal-component analyses of 4 face-recognition studies uncovered 2 independent components. The first component was strongly related to false-alarm errors with new faces as well as to facial "conjunctions" that recombine features of previously studied faces. The second component was strongly related to hits as well as to the conjunction/new difference in false-alarm errors. The pattern of loadings on both components was impressively invariant across the experiments, which differed in age range of participants, stimulus set, list length, facial orientation, and the presence versus absence of familiarized lures along with conjunction and entirely new lures in the recognition test. Taken together, the findings show that neither component was exclusively related to discrimination, criterion, configural processing, featural processing, context recollection, or familiarity. Rather, the data are consistent with a neuropsychological model that distinguishes frontal and occipitotemporal contributions to face recognition memory. Within the framework of the model, findings showed that frontal and occipitotemporal contributions are discernible from the pattern of individual differences in behavioral performance among healthy young adults.

Associative memory in aging: The effect of unitization on source memory.

“…Age invariance in associative memory would thus depend on how much memory performance can rely on familiarity, as also suggested by the preserved ability of older adults to discriminate between studied and unstudied intra-facial combinations in a task demonstrated as being familiarity-dependent (Bartlett, Shastri, Abdi, & Neville-Smith, 2009; Edmonds et al, 2012). In contrast, when item and color were encoded as separate components, source retrieval depends more heavily on recollection.…”

On the particular vulnerability of face recognition to aging: a review of three hypotheses

“…If there is a match, a feeling of familiarity will arise. Here, the framework posits that familiarity and recollection can be separated (e.g., Bartlett et al, 2009 ; Edmonds et al, 2012 ) in the final decision process. Recognition based on feelings of familiarity does not require the retrieval of additional information regarding the person the face belongs to, the context under which the face was previously encountered, etc.…”

The Executive Control of Face Memory

“…Finally, we note that the neuropsychological model postulating separate temporal lobe and frontal lobe contributions to face memory (Fig. 4) has received indirect support from recent studies of face recognition in normal subjects that used principal component analyses to identify two independent components: one serving to increase hits (temporal lobe memory) and the other to reduce false alarms (frontal executive) [5].…”

“…Similar to the neuropsychological explanations offered to account for memory distortions in frontal patients, false facial recognition in older individuals has been attributed to an age-related deficit in context recollection and a corresponding increase in the use of familiarity when making face memory decisions [1,3,47,64,74]. Furthermore, it has been suggested that the context-recollection deficit responsible for the increased susceptibility of older adults to face memory illusions reflected an age-related decline in frontal lobe function [5,18,64]. This theoretical formulation is consistent with other evidence that automatic memory processes such as familiarity remain relatively invariant with age while more controlled memory processes such as recollection and source monitoring show agerelated decline [28,30,33,76,83], and also with neuroimaging studies demonstrating prominent changes in frontal lobe structural/functional integrity with increasing age [8,15,27,78].…”

“…To test the context-recollection deficit hypothesis of the age-related increase in face memory distortions, we [18] recently conducted a study comparing the performance of 40 old (mean age = 74.0, range = 63-86) and 40 young (mean age = 20.8, range = 18-28) cognitively intact adults on a face memory paradigm originally developed by Bartlett et al [5]. This recognition memory task included three different types of distractor items with varying levels of familiarity: "familiarized lures" that were exact repetitions of faces that participants were exposed to in a personality rating task conducted prior to the presentation of the study list, "conjunction lures" that were synthetic faces created by recombining the inner regions (eyes, nose, and mouth) and the outer regions (hair, ears, and jaw line) from two different study faces, and entirely new faces.…”