Carry-Over Effect of Processing Style: From Imagination Task to Recognition Task

Accurately recognizing others’ faces is very important for living successfully in the society. However, we often fail to recognize them. What causes such a problem? Numerous psychological studies reported that the performance of facial recognition was influenced by prior mental activities, so-called carry-over effect. It is considered that mental activities have two types of processing style, global processing and local processing. Global processing refers to attend the general meaning of an event. Local processing refers to attend to elements themselves. Recent studies showed that prior mental activities requiring local processing interfered with face recognition. However, it is still controversial whether or not this interference on recognition occurs only in face recognition. Here, in order to investigate if face is special for recognition, we conducted the experiments in which participants were required a prior mental activity and a following recognition task. As the prior mental activity, we used an imagination task in which participants were asked to imagine a faraway place (global processing) or a nearby place (local processing). The face and the scene picture recognition tasks were used as recognition tasks. Our results showed that the accuracy of face recognition after imagining the nearby place was worse than that after imagining the faraway place. Additionally, the same pattern was observed for scene picture recognition. The results suggest that local processing at the imagination task was carried over into not only face recognition but also scene recognition, and that local processing harmed these recognition tasks.