Repetition priming for familiar and unfamiliar faces in a sex-judgment task: Evidence for a common route for the processing of sex and identity.

Abstract

Repetition priming for faces was examined in a sex-judgment task given at test. Priming was found for edited, hair-removed photos of unfamiliar and familiar faces after a single presentation at study. Priming was also observed for the edited photos when study and test faces were different exemplars. Priming was not observed, however, when sex judgments were made at test to photos of complete, hair-included faces. These findings were interpreted by assuming that, for edited faces, internal features are attended, thereby activating face-recognition units that support performance. With complete faces, however, participants provided speeded judgments based primarily on the hairstyle. It is suggested that, for both familiar and unfamiliar faces, a common locus exists for the processing of the identity of a face and its sex. A single face-recognition model for the processing of familiar and unfamiliar faces is advocated.In this article, themes from the implicit-memory literature were imported to improve our understanding of the processes involved in face recognition. Standard face-recognition models suggest that a benefit from prior exposure of the face should be observed only when information about the identity of the face is extracted (e.g., "Is the face that of a famous person?", "Is the face that of an actor?"). In contrast, we suggest that the extraction of visual facial information (e.g., the sex or emotion of the face) should also benefit from such prior exposure. Nonetheless, on the basis of notions developed in the implicit-memory literature, we argue that the extraction and retrieval of visual facial information can benefit from prior exposure of the face only if the stimulus is processed in its entirety, but not if processing neglects the perceptual whole. The respective predictions from the two literatures will be put to an empirical test.On implicit-memory tests, memory is indexed by facilitation in performance that results from prior experience. To illustrate, in the speeded familiarity task, participants are presented during study with a series of familiar faces (e.g., a photo of Bill Clinton). Then, during test, they are presented with a second series that includes both studied and unstudied familiar and unfamiliar faces. Typically, participants decide that a face is familiar more accurately and more quickly if that face was previously shown in the first series (cf. Bruce & Valentine, 1985;A. W. Ellis, Flude, Young, & Burton, 1996). This facilitation in performance to studied as comYonatan Goshen-Gottstein and Tzvi Ganel, Department of Psychology, Tel-Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Israel.Portions of this article were part of Tzvi Ganel's doctoral dissertation. We thank Vicki Bruce, Mike Burton, Robert E. Lubow, Dafna Bergerbest, and Yoav Aryeh for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. We also thank Sagit Ganel for help with the graphic design of the stimuli.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Yonatan Goshen-Gottstein, Department of Psychology, Tel-Aviv University, R...

Spacing effects in cued-memory tasks for unfamiliar faces and nonwords

“…Many studies of familiar faces have shown that priming decreases when the study and test stimuli differ because of a change of viewpoint (e.g., Bruce & Valentine, 1985;Ellis, Young, Flude, & Hay, 1987) or picture format (Bruce, Burton, Carson, Hanna, & Mason, 1994). A reduction in priming with viewpoint changes between study and test has also been found for unfamiliar faces (e.g., Goshen-Gottstein & Ganel, 2000), although one study reported a similar amount of reaction time facilitation from identical and changed-viewpoint pictures across multiple repeated presentations (Hay, 2000). This exception aside, pose changes between study and test may account for some failures to find evidence of priming for unfamiliar faces (e.g., Campbell & DeHaan, 1998).…”

“…With tasks such as familiarity decision or naming of familiar faces, long-term repetition priming is strong (e.g., Bruce & Valentine, 1985;Ellis, Young, & Flude, 1990). However, with unfamiliar faces, for which the range of tasks is more restricted, much less repetition priming, if any, is found (e.g., Ellis et al, 1990;Goshen-Gottstein & Ganel, 2000). One theoretically important manipulation is to vary the face pictures between study and test.…”

Will a category cue attract you? Motor output reveals dynamic competition across person construal.

“…Moreover, category-relevant features (e.g., hair, which is a reliable cue indicative of sex and readily utilized in sex categorizations; Brown & Perrett, 1993;Goshen-Gottstein & Ganel, 2000) can automatically trigger category activation itself . Thus, the extraction of a mere perceptual cue is sufficient to activate a social category representation per se.…”

Stimulus/Response Learning in Masked Congruency Priming of Faces: Evidence for Covert Mental Classifications?

“…Indeed many studies originally failed to find priming for unfamiliar (previously unseen) faces (Ellis, Young, & Flude, 1990). More recent work has found repetition priming for unfamiliar faces (Goshen-Gottstein & Ganel, 2000), albeit smaller in size than for familiar faces, one explanation of which is the rapid formation of presemantic, perceptual representations of faces (Martin & Greer, 2011). Such an explanation could not explain semantic priming for unfamiliar faces, however (when prime and probe are typically no more perceptually similar for primed than for unprimed conditions).…”