Does dual coding for faces exist?

This study, assessed the role of verbal coding remembering faces. The resea rch presented here used the dual-coding paradigm (-Paivio and Csapo, 1969; Lieury and Calvez, 1986) applied to faces and names. This paradigm tried to highlight the effect of variables, such as the lexical complexity, and the ambiguity of pictures, on the critical time of dual coding. In this experi ment, only the lexical component was taken into account. A pilot experiment was conducted in order to check the material, especially familiarity with faces and names used. The experiment highlighted two trends : 1 / In the ab sence of instruction regarding the verbalisation of faces (i.e. task of rec ognition), the effect of the lexical variable was not constant. Furthermore , an interaction between the duration of the introduction and its mode (fac e or name) was found. The latter has an effect on the extent of recognition ; it was proposed that this effect should be linked to the time spent obser ving visually faces as well as to the dual coding of names and faces in mem ory for more than 500 ms. 2 / When asked explicitly to verbalize a face (th e recall task), performances obtained were relatively high but no differenc es between faces and names were observed. These results are consistent with models that assume person identify, nodes common to faces and names.