Repetition Priming and Face Processing: Priming Occurs within the System that Responds to the Identity of a Face

Abstract

A familiar stimulus that has recently been recognized will be recognized a second time more quickly and more accurately than if it had not been primed by the earlier encounter. This is the phenomenon of "repetition priming". Four experiments on repetition priming of face recognition suggest that repetition priming is a consequence of changes within the system that responds to the familiarity of a stimulus. In Experiment 1, classifying familiar faces by occupation facilitated subsequent responses to the same faces in a familiarity decision task (Is this face familiar or unfamiliar?) but not in an expression decision task (Is this face smiling or unsmiling?) or a sex decision task (Is this face male or female?). In Experiment 2, familiar faces showed repetition priming in a familiarity decision task, regardless of whether a familiarity judgment or an expression judgment had been required when the faces were first encountered. Expression decisions to familiar faces again failed to show repetition priming. In Experiment 3, familiar faces showed repetition priming in a familiarity decision task, regardless of whether a familiarity judgment or a sex judgment had been asked for when the faces were first encountered. Sex decisions to familiar faces again failed to show repetition priming. In Experiment 4, familiarity decisions continued to show repetition priming when a brief presentation time with encouragement to respond while the face was displayed reduced response latencies to speeds comparable to those for sex and expression judgments in Experiments 1 to 3. The results are problematic for theories that propose that repetition priming is mediated by episodic records of previous acts of stimulus encoding.

Robust representations for face recognition: The power of averages

“…Hay & Young, 1982;Ellis, 1986), as well as descendents of it (Brédart, Valentine, Calder & Gassi, 1995;Burton, Bruce & Johnston, 1990;Hanley, 1995. These units have been recruited in explanations of a very wide range of phenomena, for example patterns of priming (Ellis, Young & Flude, 1990;Ellis, Flude, Young & Burton, 1996;Schweinberger, 1996;Young, Hellawell & de Haan, 1988), cross modal person recognition (Hanley & Turner, 2000;Schweinberger, Herholz & Stief, 1997) and certain characteristics of prosopagnosia (Burton, Young, Bruce, Johnston & Ellis, 1991;de Haan, Young & Newcombe, 1987;Young & Burton, 1999). However, despite the theoretical utility of this construct, all the papers cited above remain silent about how it might actually be implemented.…”

Crossmodal priming of unfamiliar faces supports early interactions between voices and faces in person perception

“…Participants first learned to associate 24 unfamiliar faces with unfamiliar voices, by repeatedly presenting face-voice pairs during a learning session. We then tested face recognition performance using a familiarity decision (i.e., old-new) paradigm, known to promote priming (see e.g., Ellis, Young, & Flude, 1990) in which each test face stimulus was preceded by a voice prime. We predicted that face familiarity decisions would be facilitated by a voice prime provided the voice was associated with the face stimulus in memory and not if it were unrelated.…”

Prime time advertisements: Repetition priming from faces seen on subject recruitment posters

“…The fact that repetition priming of face recognition is domain-specific is important here (faces prime face familiarity decisions, but names do not; see, e.g., Bruce & Valentine, 1985;Ellis et aI., 1987). Moreover, Ellis et al (1990) ble way of pooling the same-exemplar and differentexemplar items. )…”

“…With this type of methodology, it has been shown on a number ofoccasions that the repetition priming of faces is obtained from earlier exposure to the same pictures of familiar celebrities (Bruce & Valentine, 1985;Ellis, Young, & Flude, 1990;Ellis et al, 1987; for reviews, see Bruce, Burton, Carson, Hanna, & Mason, 1994;Ellis, 1992;Young, 1994), and that it is obtained, although reduced in magnitude, after exposure to different pictures of the celebrities (Bruce & Valentine, 1985;Ellis et al, 1987). Priming offace familiarity decision is not obtained from earlier exposure to the names of the celebrities (Bruce & Valentine, 1985;Ellis et al, 1987), nor is face recognition primed by earlier exposure to pictures of the headless bodies of the people (Ellis et al, 1987).…”