Effects of contextual elaboration on face recognition.

Four experiments were conducted to test the effects of an elaborated verbal encoding context on face recognition. The verbal context consisted of short descriptive phrases about the person shown, and the degree of elaboration was manipulated by varying the number of such phrases across faces. In all four experiments, subjects initially studied faces either alone or accompanied by one or more descriptive phrases. The first two experiments required subjects to recognize faces unaccompanied by the original phrases, the third required phrase recall as well as face recognition, and the fourth experiment tested face recognition both with and without the reinstatement of the original verbal encoding context. All four experiments provided evidence that subjects were more likely to recognize a face when they had received information about the person than when they had not. An interaction between encoding and retrieval was found in Experiment 4 such that elaboration facilitated face recognition more when the encoding context was reinstated than when it was not. The results demonstrate that verbal elaboration of a meaningful visual stimulus can facilitate recognition memory.