Repetition priming of face recognition

Abstract

Three experiments investigating the priming of the recognition of familiar faces are reported. In Experiment 1, recognizing the face of a celebrity in an “Is this face familiar?” task was primed by exposure several minutes earlier to a different photograph of the same person, but not by exposure to the person's written name (a partial replication of Bruce and Valentine, 1985). In Experiment 2, recognizing the face of a personal acquaintance was again primed by recognizing a different photograph of their face, but not by recognizing the acquaintance from that person's body shape, clothes etc. Experiment 3 showed that maximum repetition priming is obtained from prior exposure to an identical photograph of a famous face, less from a similar photograph, and least (but still significant) from a dissimilar photograph. We argue that repetition priming is a function of the degree of physical similarity between two stimuli and that lack of priming between different stimulus types (e.g., written names and faces, or bodies and faces) may be attributable to lack of physical similarity between prime and test stimuli. Repetition priming effects may be best explained by some form of “instance-based” model such as that proposed by McClelland and Rumelhart (1985).

Identity Adaptation is Mediated and Moderated by Visualisation Ability

“…This trend was in the opposite direction to the adaptation effects, but was not significantly different from chance (w 2 1 1X667, p 4 0X19). This finding indicates the possibility of priming occurring when the stimuli are presented brieflyöa finding that is similar to the effect of repetition priming observed by Ellis et al (1987). However, the effect was not significant in the present study.…”

“…Priming is whereby prior presentation of a stimulus speeds up the processing of the same or a related stimulus and has been used to explore the multimodel architecture of the face-recognition system. For example, Ellis et al (1987) demonstrated that familiarity judgments made to a face were quicker if that face had been primed previously. The magnitude of this priming effect was dependent on the perceptual similarity between the prime and the target: response times were faster to the target face when the prime and target face were in the same pose than when they were in different poses.…”

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

“…In both cases, a fixation cross immediately replaced the written words for 500 ms, to ensure that the participant was alerted to the subsequent exposure of the face image in both the prime and no-prime conditions. On the basis of predictions from the IAC model (Burton et al, 1990) and previous reports about the short duration of cross-domain priming effects (see e.g., Calder, Young, Benson, & Perrett, 1996;Ellis, Young, Flude, & Hay, 1987) we were not concerned that this 500 ms interval would affect priming. The fixation cross was then followed by a test face for 2 s. Again, response time was measured from the onset of the test face.…”

Exploring a neural-network account of age-of-acquisition effects using repetition priming of faces

“…Prior exposure to a face acts to reduce reaction times in tasks such as face naming (Valentine, Moore, & Bredart, 1995), familiarity judgments (Bruce & Valentine, 1985), and semantic classification (A. W. Ellis, Young, Flude, & Hay, 1987;Lewis & H. D. Ellis, 1999). The repetition-priming effect can be long lasting and is largest when exactly the same view of the primed individual is shown .…”