ENCODING OPERATIONS AND RECOGNITION MEMORY FOR FACES

Two experiments examined the effects of encoding operations on forced- choice recognition memory for upright and inverted photographs of face s. In Experiment 1, with distracters closely matched to targets, perfo rmance was better on upright than on inverted faces, but was unaffecte d by whether subjects judged faces for distinctive features, distincti ve traits or distinctive expressions. In Experiment 2, where distracte rs were either absent or weakly matched to distracters, accuracy was a gain higher on upright than on inverted faces, and was similar for the three encoding operations on upright faces. In contrast, it was poore r for distinctive expression judgments than for distinctive feature or for distinctive trait judgments on inverted faces. These results supp ort Winograd's (1981) claim that distinctive feature and distinctive t rait judgments both lead to the isolation of distinctive features. How ever, it was argued that distinctive expression judgments led to confi gural processing that was disrupted by inversion.