McKone, E., & Peh, Y. X. (2006). Memory conjunction errors for realistic faces are consistent
with configural processing. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 13, 106-111.
The authors of the article were testing the claim (made by Reinitz & Hannigan, among others) that facial stimuli are treated the same as word stimuli within the context of the memory conjunction paradigm.
Reinitz & Hannigan presented participants with line-drawings of faces and at test recombined features of those line drawings (the eyes & nose of one face with the hair & mouth of another face). They found that false alarms to the conjunction faces were as high as hits to the targets. McKone & Peh argue that this should not be the case because faces are processed holistically and not usually broken down in to component features. They say that there are a couple of reasons why Reinitz & Hannigan could have obtained their results: they were using line drawings instead of actual photographs, and they were mixing internal & external facial features, even though there is evidence that external features such as hair are processed differently than the internal features of a face.
Experiment 1:
Method
McKone & Peh created an experiment very similar to the one conducted by Reinitz & Hannigan except they used photographs of faces (with no hair) and they had a condition where the faces were presented upside-down (because we do not process inverted faces holistically, they expected this condition to have results similar to those obtained by Reinitz & Hannigan). Like R & H, they presented participants with two faces at a time and tested participants on conjunctions of faces that were presented simultaneously (SC) or not simultaneously (NSC).
Results
They found that, for inverted faces, the results were similar to R&H. However, for the upright faces, hits to targets were much higher than false alarms to conjunctions. Therefore, this is evidence that we do process upright faces holistically.
Experiment 2:
Method
To reduce the amount of processing of “parts” in Experiment 1, the authors presented the faces individually.
Results
By coding the data in a way to create equally spaced conditions between targets, conjunctions, and foils, they were able to replicate the results of Experiment 1. That is, for upright faces TARGETS>CONJUNCTIONS> FOILS. For inverted faces, TARGETS = CONJUNCTIONS FOILS.
The authors claim that faces are processed holistically and so theories of conjunction errors that treat all stimuli (sentences, words, faces) equally are incorrect. Instead, researchers should take into account perceptual processing when creating memory theories.
Important Legal
Disclaimer: The preceding are articles we read together in the Lampinen Lab
Fall 2006 false memory reading group. By clicking on the authors’ names of each
article you can see the summary of that article. The summary was prepared by
the student presenting that article and it is of course the case that the views
expressed in the summary do not necessarily represent the views of the reading
group as a whole, Dr. Lampinen, the Lampinen Lab, the University of Arkansas,
the Razorback Football or Basketball teams (although we're not sure about cross
country), people living down the street from us, Bob Dylan, Jack Fate, our
extended families, or anyone else for that matter except for the student who
wrote the summary (and they don't necessarily believe what they wrote either).