Recognizing Faces, Objects, and Words
Location
D.P. Culp Center Ballroom
Start Date
4-5-2024 9:00 AM
End Date
4-5-2024 11:30 AM
Poster Number
165
Name of Project's Faculty Sponsor
Mitchell Meltzer
Faculty Sponsor's Department
Psychology
Competition Type
Competitive
Type
Poster Presentation
Presentation Category
Social Sciences
Abstract or Artist's Statement
Although much evidence suggests that faces elicit different perceptual processes and patterns of brain activity than other types of stimuli, whether they are recognized as familiar in a unique fashion remains largely unknown. The current experiment addressed this topic in the context of a feature-based model of recognition, which proposes that stimuli are recognized by breaking them down into their constituent parts, and a template model, which proposes that stimuli are recognized as whole units. Participants studied lists of faces, non-face objects, and printed words, and then took a recognition test for each type of stimulus containing “intact” items they had studied, “conjunction” items that recombined the parts of items they had studied, and entirely new items. At test, participants were given either “exclusion” instructions which required them to accept only intact items as “old” while rejecting both conjunction and entirely new items as “new”, or “inclusion” instructions which required them to accept both intact and conjunction faces as “old” while rejecting only entirely new items as “new”. Thus, the exclusion versus inclusion instructions differed only in how participants were told to respond to conjunction items. Intact/conjunction discrimination, or the degree to which participants accepted more intact items than conjunction items as “old”, was greater for participants in the exclusion condition than for those in the inclusion condition with non-face objects and printed words. This suggests that participants were able to flexibly respond to conjunctions according to varying task demands with those stimuli, presumably through an awareness of the recombined nature of such items. By contrast, instruction condition had little influence on intact/conjunction discrimination with faces. This suggests that participants were unable to flexibly respond to conjunction faces according to varying task demands, presumably because they were oblivious to the recombined nature of such items. Taken together, this pattern of results suggests that participants can process constituent parts of non-face objects and words more independently than constituent parts of faces, and that a template model best accounts for recognition memory for faces, while a feature-based model best accounts for recognition memory of other stimuli.
Recognizing Faces, Objects, and Words
D.P. Culp Center Ballroom
Although much evidence suggests that faces elicit different perceptual processes and patterns of brain activity than other types of stimuli, whether they are recognized as familiar in a unique fashion remains largely unknown. The current experiment addressed this topic in the context of a feature-based model of recognition, which proposes that stimuli are recognized by breaking them down into their constituent parts, and a template model, which proposes that stimuli are recognized as whole units. Participants studied lists of faces, non-face objects, and printed words, and then took a recognition test for each type of stimulus containing “intact” items they had studied, “conjunction” items that recombined the parts of items they had studied, and entirely new items. At test, participants were given either “exclusion” instructions which required them to accept only intact items as “old” while rejecting both conjunction and entirely new items as “new”, or “inclusion” instructions which required them to accept both intact and conjunction faces as “old” while rejecting only entirely new items as “new”. Thus, the exclusion versus inclusion instructions differed only in how participants were told to respond to conjunction items. Intact/conjunction discrimination, or the degree to which participants accepted more intact items than conjunction items as “old”, was greater for participants in the exclusion condition than for those in the inclusion condition with non-face objects and printed words. This suggests that participants were able to flexibly respond to conjunctions according to varying task demands with those stimuli, presumably through an awareness of the recombined nature of such items. By contrast, instruction condition had little influence on intact/conjunction discrimination with faces. This suggests that participants were unable to flexibly respond to conjunction faces according to varying task demands, presumably because they were oblivious to the recombined nature of such items. Taken together, this pattern of results suggests that participants can process constituent parts of non-face objects and words more independently than constituent parts of faces, and that a template model best accounts for recognition memory for faces, while a feature-based model best accounts for recognition memory of other stimuli.