Open AccessResemblance to familiar faces is exaggerated in memory
Author(s) -
Tomita Akitoshi,
Yamamoto Sayumi,
Matsushita Soyogu,
Morikawa Kazunori
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
japanese psychological research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.392
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1468-5884
pISSN - 0021-5368
DOI - 10.1111/jpr.12032
Subject(s) - psychology , cognitive psychology , face (sociological concept) , face perception , recognition memory , degree (music) , encoding (memory) , perception , cognition , linguistics , neuroscience , philosophy , physics , acoustics
Recognition memory performance for familiar faces is better than that for unfamiliar faces. However, it is unclear whether this “familiarity effect” also occurs for unfamiliar faces which resemble familiar faces. In Experiment 1, we tested recognition memory for unfamiliar faces, and showed that unfamiliar faces that resemble familiar faces are recognized more accurately than are unfamiliar faces that do not. In Experiment 2, we attempted to measure how accurately the degree of resemblance is remembered. We had participants remember unfamiliar faces that resembled either familiar faces or unfamiliar faces. Then the participants were asked to choose the face that they thought they had seen from an array of faces whose degree of resemblance was systematically varied. The results demonstrated that resemblance to familiar faces enhances encoding of facial information, and that the degree of resemblance to familiar faces is exaggerated in memory. Experiment 3 indicated that people perceive mild anti‐caricatures to be most like the real faces that are familiar to them. This finding suggests that exaggerated resemblance in memory is not due to exaggerated representations of familiar faces.