The influence of working memory load on visual selective attention was examined using a dual selective attention and working memory task. This dual task required participants to ignore distractor faces while categorizing superimposed celebrity names under low or high memory loads. Surprisingly, both memory load conditions produced equivalent interference effects from concurrent famous (compared...

Other-race and other-ethnicity effects on face memory have remained a topic of consistent research interest over several decades, across fields including face perception, social psychology, and forensic psychology (eyewitness testimony). Here we demonstrate that the Cambridge Face Memory Test format provides a robust method for measuring these effects. Testing the Cambridge Face Memory Test ori...

We report a functional imaging study of drawing cartoon faces. Normal, untrained participants were scanned while viewing simple black and white cartoon line drawings of human faces, retaining them for a short memory interval, and then drawing them without vision of their hand or the paper. Specific encoding and retention of information about the faces were tested for by contrasting these two st...

We report a functional imaging study of drawing cartoon faces. Normal, untrained participants were scanned while viewing simple black and white cartoon line-drawings of human faces, retaining them for a short memory interval, and then drawing them without vision of their hand or the paper. Specific encoding and retention of information about the faces was tested for by contrasting these two sta...

The present study examined the effects of genetic subtype on social memory in children (7-16 years) with Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS). Visual event-related potentials (ERPs) during a passive viewing task were used to compare incidental memory traces for repeated vs single presentations of previously unfamiliar social (faces) and nonsocial (houses) images in 15 children with the deletion subtype ...

It is known that the adult visual memory system is fractionable into functionally independent cognitive subsystems, selectively susceptible to brain damage. However, it is unclear whether these cognitive subsystems can fractionate developmentally. The present study describes an investigation of visual memory of a patient (PE) with multiple developmental disorders. PE was congenitally deaf, had ...

It is known that happy faces create more robust identity recognition memory than faces with some other expressions. However, this advantage was not verified against all basic expressions. Moreover, no research has assessed whether similar differences also exist among other expressions. To tackle these questions, we compared the effects of six basic emotional expressions on recognition memory us...

Previous studies sought to test for the existence of a “cheater-detection module” by testing for enhanced memory for the faces of cheaters, but past results have been inconclusive. Here, we present four experiments showing that old–new discrimination was not affected by whether a face was associated with a history of cheating, trustworthy or irrelevant behavior. In contrast, source memory for f...

The term "own-race bias" refers to the phenomenon that humans are typically better at recognizing faces from their own than a different race. The perceptual expertise account assumes that our face perception system has adapted to the faces we are typically exposed to, equipping it poorly for the processing of other-race faces. Sociocognitive theories assume that other-race faces are initially c...