I recognise your name but I can't remember your face: An advantage for names in recognition memory

Using the attribute amnesia paradigm to test the automatic memory advantage of person names

Person names, which hold within them extensive meaning, such as gender and cultural information, play an essential role in our social interaction. The intentional memory advantage of person names has been proved, but whether the automatic memory advantage of them exists remains unclear. In order to explore this question, we used a paradigm called attribute amnesia that allows us to test the automatic memory of person names in a working memory task. In Experiment 1, we adopted a classic attribute amnesia paradigm including 11 pre-surprise trials requiring participants to report the location of the target (person names or animal names) among three distractors and one surprise trial requiring them to unexpectedly report the identity of the target. The results showed that the identity report accuracy of person names in the surprise test was significantly better than that of animal names that served as a control group. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 but increased the number of pre-surprise trials that could reduce the report accuracy of surprise test according to previous studies. The results revealed that the accuracy of the surprise test of person names decreased significantly, and showed no significant difference from that of animal names. These results suggest that there exists an automatic memory advantage of person names in working memory; however, such an automatic memory advantage effect could be reduced after participants learn to stop automatically encoding the attended but no-need-to-report person names through experiencing sufficient trials.

The Influence of Prior Knowledge on Memory and Metamemory for Famous Names and Faces

Abstract. Two experiments examined the effect of prior knowledge on memory and metamemory for names and faces using famous 1960s and 2000s actors as the manipulation of prior knowledge. In Experiment 1, 66 participants studied the names of famous actors, half presented with their faces, with instructions to remember only the names. In Experiment 2, 56 participants studied the faces of these actors, half presented with their names, with instructions to remember only the faces. In both experiments, participants made immediate Judgments of Learning (JOLs) for each to-be-remembered stimulus followed by a test of recognition that used a Recollect/Familiar/No-Memory judgment. We found higher JOLs, recognition memory, and JOL accuracy for 2000s actors. Adding a name to a face or a face to a name increased JOLs while paradoxically decreasing memory. Back-sorting and binning analyses converged on the conclusion that immediate JOLs predicted memories accompanied by recollection but not familiarity.

The occipital face area is causally involved in identity-related visual-semantic associations

Faces are processed in a network of areas within regions of the ventral visual stream. However, familiar faces typically are characterized by additional associated information, such as episodic memories or semantic biographical information as well. The acquisition of such non-sensory, identity-specific knowledge plays a crucial role in our ability to recognize and identify someone we know. The occipital face area (OFA), an early part of the core face-processing network, is recently found to be involved in the formation of identity-specific memory traces but it is currently unclear if this role is limited to unimodal visual information. The current experiments used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to test whether the OFA is involved in the association of a face with identity-specific semantic information, such as the name or job title of a person. We applied an identity-learning task where unfamiliar faces were presented together with a name and a job title in the first encoding phase. Simultaneously, TMS pulses were applied either to the left or right OFA or to Cz, as a control. In the subsequent retrieval phase, the previously seen faces were presented either with two names or with two job titles and the task of the participants was to select the semantic information previously learned. We found that the stimulation of the right or left OFA reduced subsequent retrieval performance for the face-associated job titles. This suggests a causal role of the OFA in the association of faces and related semantic information. Furthermore, in contrast to prior findings, we did not observe hemispherical differences of the TMS intervention, suggesting a similar role of the left and right OFAs in the formation of the visual-semantic associations. Our results suggest the necessity to reconsider the hierarchical face-perception models and support the distributed and recurrent models.