Depth of processing approach to face recognition: A test of two theories.

Abstract

Three experiments investigated feature quantity and semantic quality accounts for level of processing effects on face recognition. Experiment 1 established that as the "level of processing" of a face judgment increased, the number of eye movements and inspection time increased, and subsequent recognition performance (recognition and recognition response time) improved. Experiment 2 found that, with the number of eye movements and inspection time held constant, as the "level of processing" of a face judgment increased subjects' cognitive level of processing (assessed by task-evoked peak pupillary dilation) increased, but recognition performance did not improve. Experiment 3 indicated that, with the number of eye movements held constant, recognition performance did not improve as a function of inspection time. These findings are consistent with a feature quantity hypothesis.Experiment 1 is based on an independent study completed at Gettysburg College by Lance C. Bloom and was presented at the 61st Annual Meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association in Philadelphia, April 1, 1990.We thank Dr. Robert Bornstein for his advice, encouragement, and helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article; Robert Crowder, Geoffrey Loftus, Keith Rayner, and Don Read for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article; Marion Willetts-Bloom for comments on earlier drafts of this article and assistance in procedure development in Experiment 1; Amy Kale and Elizabeth Peabody for assistance in scoring data; Wayne Wolfe for overseeing the construction of slide materials; and Sharon Emmons for figure consulting and engineering.

Stereotype priming in face recognition: Interactions between semantic and visual information in face encoding

“…However, there is no direct evidence that making personality or occupation judgements about a face either requires or results in a greater number of features being processed than does making a gender classification (Kerr & Winograd, 1982). In fact, the evidence concerning the reaction times to make these differing judgements is inconsistent: Bloom and Mudd (1991) found that "honesty" judgements took longer than gender classification, whereas Daw and Parkin (1981) found the opposite pattern of results.…”

Associative recognition of face pairs by younger and older adults: The role of familiarity-based processing.

“…Prior work examining single-item recognition has shown that evaluating personality characteristics produces superior performance compared with evaluating physical characteristics of faces (e.g., Bloom & Mudd, 1991;see Coin & Tiberghien, 1997, for a review). However, we found little or no improvement in associative recognition performance when such judgments were required (but see Naveh-Benjamin, Brav, & Levy, 2007), suggesting that elaborative encoding of pairs of faces may be difficult.…”

Beneficial effects of verbalization and visual distinctiveness on remembering and knowing faces

“…For instance, Bloom and Mudd (1991) have presented evidence that is consistent with a visual-processing, rather than a semantic-processing, account. They observed that as processing depth increases (i.e., from gender to per-sonality judgments), so the number of participants' eye movements, the time spent inspecting the face, and subsequent recognition performance increase.…”