Short-term memory for facial identity and emotion

For some time the relationship between processing of facial expression and facial identity has been in dispute. We re-examined this relationship and evaluated whether the same relationship characterized both perception and short-term memory. In three experiments we examined perception and memory for realistic, synthetic human faces. Experiment 1 used subjects’ judgments to identify, from a large library of synthetic faces, a set of 60 faces that were best recognized as expressing particular categories of emotion. Experiment 2 used the selected faces in a short-term recognition task. Subjects had to identify whether the emotional expression on a probe stimulus face matched the emotional expression on either of two study faces. Results showed that identity strongly influenced recognition of emotional expression. Multidimensional scaling of similarity/dissimilarity judgments in Experiment 3 produced a 2dimensional description of the faces’ perceptual representation. Distances among stimuli in the MDS representation, which showed a strong linkage of emotional expression and facial identity, proved to be good predictors of correct and false recognitions in Experiment 2. The convergence of results from Experiments 2 and 3 suggests that the overall structure and configuration of the faces’ perceptual representation parallel their representation in short-term memory.