Face recognition is impaired when changes are made to external face features (e.g., hairstyle), even when all internal features (i.e., eyes, nose, mouth) remain the same. Eye movement monitoring was used to determine the extent to which altered hairstyles affect processing of face features, thereby shedding light on how internal and external features are stored in memory. Participants studied a...

Working memory (WM) and emotion classification are amongst the cognitive domains where specific deficits have been reported for patients with schizophrenia. In healthy individuals, the capacity of visual working memory is enhanced when the material to be retained is emotionally salient, particularly for angry faces. We investigated whether patients with schizophrenia also have an enhanced WM ca...

Few studies have investigated long-term odor recognition memory, although some early observations suggested that the forgetting rate of olfactory representations is slower than for other sensory modalities. This study investigated recognition memory across 64 days for high and low familiar odors and faces. Memory was assessed in 83 young participants at 4 occasions; immediate, 4, 16, and 64 day...

This study extends the research on cross-race identification by examining how group presentation of faces influences the cross-race effect (CRE) and confirming systematic qualitative differences between the cognitive processes involved in memory for same- and cross-race faces. White individuals viewed 16 target faces (8 White, 8 Black) presented individually or each in a 3-face group. The condi...

We examined the influence of emotional valence and type of item to be remembered on brain activity during recognition, using faces and scenes. We used multivariate analyses of event-related fMRI data to identify whole-brain patterns, or networks of activity. Participants demonstrated better recognition for scenes vs faces and for negative vs neutral and positive items. Activity was increased in...

Most current theories of human memory are material-general in the sense that they assume that the medial temporal lobe (MTL) is important for retrieving the details of prior events, regardless of the specific type of materials. Recent studies of amnesia have challenged the material-general assumption by suggesting that the MTL may be necessary for remembering words, but is not involved in remem...

Several studies have provided evidence in favour of a norm-based representation of faces in memory. However, such models have hitherto failed to take account of how other person-relevant information affects face recognition performance. Here we investigated whether distinctive or typical auditory stimuli affect the subsequent recognition of previously unfamiliar faces and whether the type of au...

Recent studies from our laboratory have resulted in the identification of an event-related potential (ERP) correlate of a visual memory process. This memory process is reflected by a reduction in the voltage of the visual memory potential (VMP) to repeated pictures of unfamiliar faces compared to novel pictures of faces. In the current experiment we used unfamiliar and famous faces in an identi...

We investigated how memory for faces and voices (presented separately and in combination) varies as a function of sex and emotional expression (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and neutral). At encoding, participants judged the expressed emotion of items in forced-choice tasks, followed by incidental Remember/Know recognition tasks. Results from 600 participants showed that accuracy (h...