Accounts of blending, distinctiveness, and typicality in the false recognition of faces

The false recognition of distracter faces created from combinations of stud ied faces has been attributed to the creation of novel traces in memory, al though familiarity accounts an also plausible. In 3 experiments, participan ts studied parent faces and then were tested with a distracter that was cre ated by morphing 2 parents. These produced high false-alarm rates but no ef fects of a temporal separation manipulation. In a forced-choice version, pa rticipants chose the distracter over the parents. R. M. Nosofsky's (1986) G eneralized Context Model and variants could account for some but not all as pects of the data. A new model, SimSample, can account for the effects of t ypicality and distinctiveness, but not for the morph false alarms unless ex plicit prototypes are included. The conclusions are consistent with an acco unt of memory in which novel traces are created in memory; alternative expl anations are also explored.