A visual and semantic locus to beneficial effects of verbalization on face memory

Never forget a face: Verbalization facilitates recollection as evidenced by flexible responding to contrasting recognition memory tests

Verbal facilitation occurs when describing a face improves its subsequent recognition; but there are several theoretical explanations debated in the literature. The results of the present studies support a relatively unrestricted, parsimonious theory that verbal facilitation occurs because describing a face supports recollection of several different facets of the face-viewing experience. This recollection is then demonstrated by flexibly responding to two competing types of recognition task demands. Participants studied a list of faces and, following each face, performed a nonverbalization task (Experiment 1) or described its features or traits (Experiment 2). Two subsequent recognition tests included intact faces, new faces, and conjunctions (each of which recombined features of two studied faces). Inclusion test instructions emphasized featural information: respond "yes" to both intact and conjunction faces (both of which contained studied features), but "no" to new faces. Exclusion test instructions emphasized configural information: respond "yes" only to intact faces (which were the only test items that matched studied configurations), and "no" to both conjunctions and new faces. Both yes/no responses and confidence ratings supported our hypothesis that verbalization improved discrimination between (a) conjunctions and new faces in the inclusion test, and (b) intact faces and conjunctions in the exclusion test. Additional secondary responses about face type elucidated that verbalization at study improves the ability to recollect either featural or configural information, depending on which type of response the recognition test required. We discuss these findings about practical applications of improved face memory in real-world contexts.

Description Benefits, Production Benefits, and Context Retrieval for Recognition of Unfamiliar Faces

Several studies have shown that giving brief descriptions for unfamiliar faces can lead to better episodic recognition memory relative to faces in a view-only (control) condition. More broadly, this finding is consistent with the benefits of elaboration during study on later recognition. Two articles have reported description benefits when participants did not know the study condition (control or description) for a trial until after a face was removed from view (Jones, Armstrong, Casey, Burson, & Memon, 2013; Jones, Robinson, & Steel, 2018). We conducted 3 experiments to shed additional light on the basis for this benefit, and the measures we used were old–new recognition and recognition confidence for the face and the proportion of test faces with recall for descriptive information. In Experiments 1 and 2 participants were explicitly instructed to describe each study face and to type the description or not (control condition). There was a numerical advantage for “old” responses, with the difference being significant in Experiment 1. A significant advantage for the typed condition occurred for “very sure old” and recall responses for both experiments. The advantage occurred across study repetition conditions in Experiment 1 and when participants were given plenty of time to generate a description in Experiment 2. Overall, these findings indicate that physically typing the description leads to a small advantage in recollection relative to a condition without physical production (i.e., a type of physical production effect). However, the production advantage was not obtained on any measure in Experiment 3 when the control condition required participants to type the number of words in the description.

The verbal facilitation effect: re-reading person descriptions as a system variable to improve identification performance

When witnesses report a crime, police usually ask for a description of the perpetrator. Several studies suggested that verbalising faces leads to a detriment in identification performance (verbal overshadowing effect [VOE]) but the effect has been difficult to replicate. Here, we sought to reverse the VOE by inducing context reinstatement as a system variable through re-reading one's own description before an identification task. Participants (N = 208) watched a video film and were then dismissed (control group), only described the perpetrator, or described and later re-read their own descriptions before identification in either target-present or target-absent lineups after a 2-day or a 5-week delay. Identification accuracy was significantly higher after re-reading (85.0%) than in the no description control group (62.5%) irrespective of target presence. Data were internally replicated using a second target and corroborated by several small meta-analyses. Identification accuracy was related to description quality. Moreover, there was a tendency towards a verbal facilitation effect (VFE) rather than a VOE. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analyses confirm that our findings are not due to a shift in response bias but truly reflect improvement of recognition performance. Differences in the ecological validity of study paradigms are discussed.

Developmental differences in holistic interference of facial part recognition

Research has shown that adults’ recognition of a facial part can be disrupted if the part is learnt without a face context but tested in a whole face. This has been interpreted as the holistic interference effect. The present study investigated whether children of 6- and 9–10-year-olds would show a similar effect. Participants were asked to judge whether a probe part was the same as or different from a test part whereby the part was presented either in isolation or in a whole face. The results showed that while all the groups were susceptible to a holistic interference, the youngest group was most severely affected. Contrary to the view that piecemeal processing precedes holistic processing in the cognitive development, our findings demonstrate that holistic processing is already present at 6 years of age. It is the ability to inhibit the influence of holistic information on piecemeal processing that seems to require a longer period of development into at an older and adult age.

Verbal description benefits for faces when description conditions are unknown a priori

Some prior research has shown a benefit for describing nonverbal study stimuli, particularly faces, on a later recognition test relative to a control (no description) condition. In such studies, participants have known a priori whether a stimulus will need to be described, meaning that encoding differences other than the description could account for the effect. In Experiment 1, a description benefit was obtained for faces that could not be attributed to encoding differences. A direct manipulation of description duration, thus allowing more time to produce descriptors, did not influence the description effect. In Experiment 2, visual rehearsal instructions (without any verbal descriptions) failed to produce a rehearsal benefit. The experiments provide direct evidence against an account where the description or rehearsal enhances the featural information of nonverbal representations. For the present results, a benefit stemming from the encoding and retrieval of descriptors appears to be an attractive theoretical alternative over one that posits an enhancement or alteration of featural or holistic information.