SOME EXPLORATORY EXPERIMENTS ON MEMORY FOR PHOTOGRAPHS OF FACES

Yin (1970) has revived Bodamer's (1947) contention that faces are processed separately from other visual objects. This was investigated in a series of exploratory experiments in which memory for photographs of the center of the face (eyes, nose and mouth) was compared with photographs showing only the periphery (hair, ears and chin). Because facial expression emanates from the center, it is argued that any specific mechanism may affect the center but not the periphery. Although the two types of stimuli were equally difficult to recognise, the center of the face was considerably harder when paired-associates were learned. In another experiment, whole faces were compared with geometric shapes, and the faces were superior on a recognition memory test but the shapes were superior on an associate learning test. The difficulty in learning paired-associates with faces may be linked to a difficulty in constructing good verbal descriptions of faces: compared to other visual stimuli, faces appear to have low association values. A face specific mechanism would predict this, but there are more parsimonious explanations, for example, in terms of the way the brain stores visual information. © 1979.