THE INFLUENCE OF PROCESSING INSTRUCTIONS AT ENCODING AND RETRIEVAL ONFACE RECOGNITION ACCURACY

Whereas previous research has demonstrated that trait ratings of faces at encoding leads to enhanced recognition accuracy as compared to fea ture ratings, this set of experiments examines whether ratings given a fter encoding and just prior to recognition influence face recognition accuracy. In Experiment 1 subjects who made feature ratings just prio r to recognition were significantly less accurate than subjects who ma de no ratings or trait ratings. In Experiment 2 ratings were manipulat ed at both encoding and retrieval. The retrieval effect was smaller an d nonsignificant, but a combined probability analysis showed that it w as significant when results from both experiments are considered joint ly. As in previous research, subjects who rated facial features at enc oding performed less accurately than subjects who rated traits. In a t hird experiment exposure duration at retrieval, a potentially confound ing factor in Experiments 1 and 2, had a nonsignificant effect on reco gnition accuracy, suggesting that it probably does not explain the res ults from Experiments 1 and 2. These experiments demonstrate that face recognition accuracy can be influenced by processing instructions at retrieval, although additional research is needed to examine the quali fying conditions of this retrieval effect.