PUTTING FACES TO NAMES

An experiment is reported which investigated participants' ability to remember a person's face when they were presented with the person's na me. During the learning phase, participants were shown 18 unfamiliar f aces together with a name and occupation. At test, participants were p resented with a name and were asked to indicate the face and occupatio n that had been presented with that name at learning. Results showed t hat participants' ability to remember the face was contingent upon the ir ability to remember the occupation that had been presented with the name. When participants were presented with a face and were asked to remember the name, performance was also contingent upon correctly reme mbering the associated occupation, consistent with the findings of McW eeny, Young, Hay & Ellis (1987). No such contingencies were apparent w hen participants were given an occupation and were asked to remember t he associated name and face; participants frequently remembered the na me but not the face, or the face without the name. These results are c onsistent with the serial access model of person identification propos ed by Bruce & Young (1986), and with more recent developments proposed by Valentine, Bredart, Lawson & Ward (1991) and Craigie & Hanley (199 3) in which there are no direct links between the representation of a person's name in memory and visual information about their facial appe arance. The mnemonic strategies that were used by the participants dur ing the learning phase of the experiment were also examined. These str ategies help explain those few occasions on which participants appear to be able to link names to faces without identity-specific semantic i nformation.