Familiar person recognition: Do we remember more episodic memories from faces than from names? Catherine Barsics & Serge Brédart Cognitive Psychology Unit, University of Liège, Belgium Introduction Three kinds of information can be retrieved from the recognition of a person: lexical information (i.e. the name), semantic information (e.g. the occupation), and episodic information, such as a memory of a specific occasion or context where this familiar person was encountered. Some studies recently showed that episodic information is more likely to be retrieved following familiar face recognition than familiar voice recognition (1, 2). The aim of the present experiment was to investigate whether this face advantage would remain for other cues to person identity, e.g. the name. For that purpose, we used the Remember/Know paradigm (3) to investigate the retrieval of episodic information following familiar face versus familiar name recognition. If faces really have an advantage, one would predict a better episodic information retrieval from face recognition than from name recognition, with significantly more Remember responses following face recognition than name recognition. Results Fig 1 : Hit rates Fig 2 : False Alarm rates Fig 3 : Remember responses conditionalized on the hits * Method Participants 36 healthy participants (19 females) aged from 17 to 24 years (mean = 20; SD = 1,67) Material Participants were randomly allocated to one of two conditions: they were presented either with faces or names. 128 items 32 famous faces 32 famous names (same persons as in the Face condition) 32 unknown faces (matched with famous faces for gender and age) 32 unknown names (matched with famous names for gender, number of words, nationality) In a pilot study, presented faces and names were previously judged by an independent group of participants as eliciting equivalent levels of familiarity (using a 7-point Likert scale). Procedure Participants were tested individually. For each presented item, they had to perform a simple yes/no recognition task. Then, for each recognized item, they had to make a Remember/Know judgment and to justify it. Conclusion Present results do not provide any evidence supporting that face recognition is more likely to be associated with an experience of Remembering than name recognition. This finding contrasts with recent accounts assuming that faces are more prone to yield episodic memories than other cues to person identity, such as voice (1, 2). Such results are consistent with Bruce and Young’s (1986) model of person recognition (4) as well as with Interactive Activation and Competition models of person recognition (5). References (1) Damjanovic, L., & Hanley, J.R. (2007). Recalling episodic and semantic information about famous faces and voices. Memory & Cognition, 35(6), 1205-1210. (2) Barsics, C., & Brédart, S. (2009). Recalling episodic information about personally known faces and voices. (in preparation) Tulving, E. (1985). Memory and consciousness. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne, 26(1), 1-12. (4) Bruce, V., & Young, A.W. (1986). Understanding face recognition. British Journal of Psychology, 77(3), 305-327. (5) Burton, A.M., Bruce, V., & Johnston, R.A. (1990). Understanding face recognition with an interactive activation model. British Journal of Psychology, 81(3), 361-380.