DOES FLUENCY OF FACE DESCRIPTION IMPLY SUPERIOR FACE RECOGNITION

While viewing a set of 10 standard portraits, independent judges used a checklist, composed of facial features, each with several appropriate descriptive adjectives, to construct verbal descriptions of the faces. Subjects also briefly viewed the standard portraits and used the checklist to construct verbal portraits from memory. Subjects’ accuracy of description was assessed by comparing their responses to composite descriptions derived from the judge’s concordant responses. In the final phase of the study, subjects’ recognition memory for faces was measured on a completely new set of faces. Correlational analysis revealed no association between describing ability and recognition memory performance. Further analysis indicated that better describers might be slightly better recognizers, but the effect was weak. Two earlier studies also failed to demonstrate a relationship between recognition ability and describing ability. © 1979, The Psychonomic Society, Inc.. All rights reserved.