Access to visual information from a name is contingent on access to identity-specific semantic information

Abstract

In this study, we investigated subjects' ability to retrieve information about a familiar person's facial appearance in response to seeing their name. Each famous name was associated with one of four occupations (sport, music, politics, and acting) and one of four distinctive facial features (beard, long hair, glasses, baldness). Subjects were asked to state which occupation, and which facial feature was associated with each name. The most important finding was that subjects were generally only able to recall the distinctive facial feature that a person possessed if they were also able to recall their occupation. Recall of the person's occupation, by contrast, was not contingent on remembering the person's facial appearance. These results suggest that there are no direct links between the representation of a person's name in memory and visual information about their facial appearance. The link appears to be indirect, and to be mediated by non-visual semantic information about the person, such as their occupation. This conclusion was also supported by an examination of the effects of biographical cues on subjects' ability to recall facial information that they had previously failed to recall. In a second experiment, subjects were presented with biographical details about famous people, and were asked to retrieve information about their face and name. Retrieval of facial information did not appear to be contingent on recall of the name, nor did recall of the name appear to be contingent on retrieval of facial information. On the basis of the results, an hierarchical model of name recognition is presented which is analogous to current models of face recognition (e.g. Bruce & Young, 1986).