No abstract

Reaction times to make a familiarity decision to the faces of famous people were measured after recognition of the faces in a pre-training phase had occurred spontaneously or following prompting with a name or other cue. At test, reaction times to familiar faces that had been recognized spontaneously in the pre-training phase were significantly facilitated relative to an unprimed comparison condition. Reaction times to familiar faces recognized only after prompting in the pre-training phase were not significantly facilitated. This was demonstrated both when a name prompt was used (Experiments 1 and 3) and when subjects were cued with brief semantic information (Experiment 2). Repetition priming was not found to depend on prior spontaneous recognition per se. In Experiment 3, spontaneously recognizing a familiar face did not prime subsequent familiarity judgements when the same face had only been identified following prompting on a prior encounter. In Experiment 4, recognition memory for faces recognized after cueing was found to be over 90% accurate. This indicates that prompted recognition does not yield repetition priming, even though subjects can remember the faces. A fusion of "face recognition unit" and "episodic record" accounts of the repetition priming effect may be more useful than either theory alone in explaining these results.

Conventional suggestion-based tests of hypnotizability have been criticized because they confound hypnotic and nonhypnotic suggestibility. One way around this might be to measure hypnotizability in terms of differences in suggestibility before and after hypnotic induction. However, analysis of data from a 1966 classic study by Hilgard and Tart confirms that difference scores are subject to statistical and methodological problems. Simple verbal hypnotic depth scales are presented as a useful alternative. They correlate well with conventional suggestion-based measures and enable the presence of hypnosis to be indexed independently of formal hypnotic induction procedures. Criticisms of depth scales are addressed, and normative data for the Long Stanford Scale of hypnotic depth are presented, along with data lending empirical support for the construct validity of depth reports.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s considerable publicity was given to the use of hypnosis as a technique to facilitate witness' memory in police investigations. As empirical evidence mounted, however, a number of limitations and disadvantages emerged with regard to the use of hypnosis in this role. As a consequence, hypnosis as an aid in forensic investigations is now treated with considerable caution and scepticism by many authorities, including the police. However, the present paper re-examines some of the procedures employed in hypnotic interviewing that might still be useful in the development of brief memory facilitation procedures. In particular, a brief focused breathing meditation (FM) technique is described that uses elements common to hypnotic induction, but divorced from the context label of 'hypnosis'. An experiment is described using this technique to aid face identification. As in other recent studies conducted by the authors, this procedure showed a memory facilitation effect, though without the increase in false positive errors familiar to more traditional hypnosis techniques; indeed, the trends were for FM to produce fewer false positive errors. Implications are discussed.