Recognition of faces and verbal labels

Abstract

Three groups of subjects who viewed briefly exposed target portraits were instructed to expect a recognition test in 1 week; two of these groups were told to produce written verbal labels whenever possible in the study trial. A fourth group viewed portraits and made age judgments but were unaware of the impending recognition test. Both accuracy of recognition and recall of verbal labels were measured after a 1-week delay. Instructions affecting the way a portrait is labeled had a mild effect on recognition memory; recall data offers weak support for a verbal encoding hypothesis of face recognition, but one kind of instruction did elicit better recall than another. © 1976, The Psychonomic Society, Inc.. All rights reserved.