December 2022
Volume 22, Issue 14
Open Access
Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting Abstract  |   December 2022
Forgetting a face: Attribute amnesia for familiar identities
Author Affiliations
  • Y. Ivette Colón
    University of Wisconsin - Madison
  • Emily J. Ward
    University of Wisconsin - Madison
    McPherson Eye Research Institute
Journal of Vision December 2022, Vol.22, 4446. doi:https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.22.14.4446
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      Y. Ivette Colón, Emily J. Ward; Forgetting a face: Attribute amnesia for familiar identities. Journal of Vision 2022;22(14):4446. https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.22.14.4446.

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      © ARVO (1962-2015); The Authors (2016-present)

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Abstract

People can recognize faces across variation in expression, viewpoint, and social contexts extremely quickly and with relative ease. The speed and ease at which faces can be identified suggests that identity processing is automatic, but does variation in expression, viewpoint, and social context affect how durably identity is encoded into memory? In five experiments, we tested the automaticity and durability of identity encoding using a task designed to elicit attribute amnesia, a phenomenon in which people fail to report task-relevant stimulus attributes despite having just focused their attention on the stimulus (Chen & Wyble, 2015). In each experiment, participants repeatedly viewed grids of four faces and indicated the location of the face with a specific target attribute (e.g., finding an unhappy face among happy faces). On the critical trial, participants were suddenly asked about the identity of the target face before indicating its location. Those participants who fail at this surprise identification task exhibit attribute amnesia for identity. We found that despite high accuracy when locating the target unhappy face, participants’ performance fell to chance (~25%) when identifying the target face – even when the faces were highly familiar to the participants (i.e., celebrities). However, in a separate experiment, when participants were asked to locate the celebrity face among unfamiliar faces (rather than the unhappy face, as in the previous experiment), significantly more participants successfully identified the target face in the critical surprise trial. Therefore, mere familiarity does not lead to automatic identity encoding; familiarity must be task-relevant to boost identification. Similarly, manipulating the expression valence and viewpoint of the target face did not lead to significant improvement in identification performance. Overall, we found widespread attribute amnesia for face identity, which suggests that identity is not encoded durably into memory and may not be as automatically processed as it seems.

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