Memory and Faces: Pictures Help You Remember Who Said What

Abstract

Does having the pictures of political candidates help you remember the candidates' various positions on issues? The answer from three experiments was yes. Encoding specificity was ruled out because the pictures need not be present at the memory test for the benefit to accrue. Visual distinctiveness was ruled out because the benefit appears only for faces, not other distinctive visual stimuli. The data suggest that people use pictures to generate rough personality schemas (e.g., kindly), which are then used to help organize memory for the position statements. This account was supported by demonstrating that when asked, subjects generated a greater number of characteristics for candidates whose positions were accompanied by pictures than for candidates whose positions were unaccompanied by pictures. There was also a correlation between the number of characteristics generated and memory for the candidates' positions but only when the positions were accompanied by pictures (i.e., only when the putative schemas were generated). Implications are discussed for social psychology, memory, and mass communication.

Seeing photos makes us read between the lines: The influence of photos on memory for inferences

“…Pictures can provide vivid and concrete details that aid comprehension and subsequent retention (Carney & Levin, 2002;Cherry, Dokey, Reese, & Brigman, 2003;Filippatou & Pumfrey, 1996;Glenberg & Grimes, 1995;Serra, 2010), but they also can draw attention away from text and place burdens on working memory (Liu, Kemper, & McDowd, 2009;Pike, Barnes, & Barron, 2010;Torcasio & Sweller, 2010), and depending on the content of the picture and its relation to the text, they can instead impair understanding and memory (Harp & Mayer, 1997;Mayer & Gallini, 1990;Waddill & McDaniel, 1992). Viewing photos can shape what one remembers in many settings.…”

Redefining Media Content and Structure in Terms of Available Resources

“…Lang, 1995). A great deal of research in psychology suggests that people are efficient processors of talking heads both because faces are biologically and socially significant visual stimuli that are processed automatically and because they provide additional information related to the presenter's traits (Glenberg & Grimes, 1995;Lynn, Shavitt, & Ostrom, 1985;Palermo & Rhodes, 2007;Pryor & Ostrom, 1981). Further, given that we evolved to use language, which enables people to communicate about things not present in the immediate environment, this should be a well-developed skill.…”

Neural mechanisms associated with semantic and basic self-oriented memory processes interact moderating self-esteem

“… 2 (While it is possible that memory performance for faces was not influenced by the valence of feedback presented in conjunction with a given face, that is, memory for faces was independent of feedback processing (e.g., see Will et al., 2017 for an example of this dichotomy), past research suggests that faces are often encoded in conjunction with the information they are explicitly paired with (e.g., Glenberg and Grimes, 1995 ). These mechanisms are presumed to be instantiated by associative memory processes ( Anderson and Bower, 2014 ).…”