SELF PRIMING FROM DISTINCTIVE AND CARICATURED FACES

Burton, Bruce & Johnston (1990) have recently presented an interactive activation and competition (IAC) model of face recognition. Within th is architecture they present accounts of repetition priming, semantic priming and distinctiveness effects with faces. This model predicts th at a short-lived priming effect should extend from a person's face to their name, this is called 'self priming'. The model also predicts tha t the distinctiveness of the person's face should interact with the am ount of self priming found. We tested this prediction with distinctive and typical face sets (Expt 1); results confirmed the prediction. Fro m a hybrid of Valentine's (1991 a) multidimensional space framework an d Burton et al.'s IAC model we derived a second prediction, that a car icature of a face should produce more self-priming than the veridical or an anti-caricatured (shifted towards an average face) representatio n of the face. Using continuous-tone caricatures of photographic quali ty we tested this prediction in Expts 2 and 3; results again confirmed the prediction. This finding is consistent with the idea that caricat uring works by enhancing the face's distinctiveness.