Bindemann Markus, Sandford Adam, Gillatt Katherine, Avetisyan Meri, Megreya Ahmed M
School of Psychology, University of Kent, Canterbury CT2 7NP, UK.
Perception. 2012;41(4):415-35. doi: 10.1068/p6922.
The ability to identify an unfamiliar target face from an identity lineup declines when the target is accompanied by a second face during visual encoding. This two-face disadvantage is still little studied and its basis remains poorly understood. We investigated several possible explanations for this phenomenon. Experiments 1 and 2 varied the number of potential targets (1 or 2) and the number of faces in a lineup (5 or 10) to explore if this effect arises from the number of identity comparisons that need to be made to detect a target in a lineup. We also explored if this effect arises from an uncertainty concerning which is the to-be-identified target in two-face displays, by cueing the relevant face during encoding. In experiment 3 we then examined whether the two-face disadvantage reflects the depth of face encoding or a memory effect. The results show that this effect arises from the additional comparisons that are necessary to compare two potential targets to an identity lineup when memory demands are minimised (experiment 1), but it reflects a difficulty in remembering several faces when targets and lineups cannot be viewed simultaneously (experiments 2 and 3). However, in both cases the two-face disadvantage could not be eliminated fully by cueing the target. This hints at a further possible locus for this effect, which might reflect perceptual interference during the initial encoding of the target. The implications of these findings are discussed.
当在视觉编码过程中目标面孔伴有另一张面孔时，从身份列队中识别不熟悉目标面孔的能力会下降。这种双面劣势仍鲜少被研究，其根源也仍知之甚少。我们探究了对这一现象的几种可能解释。实验1和实验2改变了潜在目标的数量（1个或2个）以及列队中面孔的数量（5张或10张），以探究这种效应是否源于在列队中检测目标时需要进行的身份比较数量。我们还通过在编码过程中提示相关面孔，探究这种效应是否源于在双面展示中不确定哪个是待识别目标。在实验3中，我们接着检验双面劣势是否反映了面孔编码的深度或记忆效应。结果表明，当记忆需求最小化时，这种效应源于将两个潜在目标与身份列队进行比较时所需的额外比较（实验1），但它反映出当目标和列队不能同时查看时记住几张面孔存在困难（实验2和实验3）。然而，在这两种情况下，通过提示目标并不能完全消除双面劣势。这暗示了这种效应的另一个可能根源，可能反映了目标初始编码过程中的感知干扰。我们讨论了这些发现的意义。
