Cash Daniella K, Papesh Megan H, Harrison Alan T
Department of Psychology and Philosophy, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts - Lowell, Lowell, MA, USA.
Exp Psychol. 2024 Nov;71(6):313-323. doi: 10.1027/1618-3169/a000631. Epub 2025 Jan 9.
Prior familiarity has been shown to increase memory for faces, but different effects emerge depending on whether the face is experimentally or pre-experimentally familiar to the observer. Across two experiments, we compared the effect of experimental and pre-experimental familiarity on recognition and source memory. Pre-experimentally familiar faces were nameable US celebrities, and unfamiliar faces were unnamable European celebrities. Within both sets, faces could be made experimentally familiar via repetition during the learning phase (studied once or thrice). At test, all studied identities were represented by novel (i.e., not studied) photos, allowing us to test memory for the identity rather than the picture. In Experiment 1, repeated presentations of both face types increased recognition rates, but accuracy was generally higher for pre-experimentally familiar faces. Experiment 2 expanded on these findings by pairing the faces with background locations and manipulating associative strength of the face-location pairs. Although pre-experimentally familiar faces were again recognized more often, they were also more likely to be falsely labeled as "old" when paired with new background locations. These results have implications for basic and applied studies examining familiar versus unfamiliar face recognition.
先前的研究表明，熟悉程度会提高对面孔的记忆，但根据面孔对观察者来说是在实验中熟悉还是在实验前就已熟悉，会产生不同的效果。在两项实验中，我们比较了实验性熟悉和实验前熟悉对面孔识别和来源记忆的影响。实验前熟悉的面孔是可叫出名字的美国名人，不熟悉的面孔是叫不出名字的欧洲名人。在这两组面孔中，通过在学习阶段重复呈现（学习一次或三次），面孔可以在实验中变得熟悉。在测试时，所有学习过的身份都由新的（即未学习过的）照片呈现，这样我们就可以测试对身份的记忆，而不是对照片的记忆。在实验1中，两种面孔类型的重复呈现都提高了识别率，但实验前熟悉的面孔的准确率通常更高。实验2通过将面孔与背景位置配对并操纵面孔 - 位置对的关联强度，对这些发现进行了扩展。虽然实验前熟悉的面孔再次被更频繁地识别，但当与新的背景位置配对时，它们也更有可能被错误地标记为“旧面孔”。这些结果对研究熟悉面孔与不熟悉面孔识别的基础研究和应用研究具有启示意义。
