Judging the familiarity of strangers: does the context matter?

Abstract

Context affects face recognition, with people more likely to recognize an acquaintance when that person is encountered in an expected and familiar place. However, we demonstrate that a familiar context can also incorrectly lead to feeling that a stranger is known. More specifically, we asked whether a familiar place can increase the belief that a stranger has been encountered outside of the experimental context (e.g., in the news or in real life). Novel faces were paired with novel places, famous places (landmarks), or neutral (solid color) backgrounds, and participants rated the preexperimental familiarity of each novel face. Across four experiments, participants misinterpreted the familiarity of the landmark backgrounds as evidence of knowing the faces outside of the experimental context. This effect only disappeared when participants failed to integrate the face with the place, judging that the two did not fit together. Our findings suggest that familiarity is not judged in isolation; rather, people are unable to completely disentangle the familiarity of the individual components of a scene. Keywords False memory . Familiarity . Face recognition . ContextImagine walking into your favorite café and noticing what appears to be a familiar face, only to realize you don't actually know the person. What role did the familiar café play in this error? Would the same error have occurred in the new café across town, in which it would be equally plausible to encounter someone familiar? Or, does the familiarity of a place influence how familiar a person in that location seems? We know that context affects face recognition; many experiments have supported Mandler's (1980) "butcher-on-the-bus" example, with recognition suffering when a person is encountered outside of their normal context (see Memon & Bruce, 1985, for a review). Such research highlights the idea that faces and their contexts are assessed together at test. However, in Mandler's example a mismatched contextual cue degrades recognition, whereas we examine how context may inappropriately increase perceived familiarity.Jacoby's attributional account of memory allows predictions about what will happen when a stranger is encountered in your favorite café. This framework assumes that feelings of familiarity need to be interpreted, often as evidence of "pastness" (Jacoby, Kelley, & Dywan, 1989). Usually this heuristic works, but it leads people astray when novel objects or experiences elicit feelings of familiarity for other reasons. For example, briefly glancing at a (nonstudied) word before deciding whether it is old or new increases the likelihood that one will incorrectly judge it as having been studied earlier in the experiment (Jacoby & Whitehouse, 1989). The literature is full of examples of people misinterpreting the fluency or ease of processing of words or symbols as evidence of familiarity (see Yonelinas, 2002, for a review).There are two key differences between the example that we propose and the existing demonstrations of familiarity misattrib...

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