Directed forgetting of emotionally valenced faces.

An item-method directed forgetting task was used in three studies to present photographs of happy, neutral and sad faces to participants who had been induced to adopt a happy, neutral or sad mood. At test remember, forget or new judgments of old and new photographs of happy, neutral or sad faces were collected. According to the affect-as-cognitive-feedback hypothesis positively valenced stimuli serve as 'go signals' validating the use of currently accessible cognitions to process task demands whereas negatively valenced stimuli serve as 'stop signals' inhibiting or reversing the use of those cognitions.

Metamemory for faces, names, and common nouns.

This study examined the metacognitive aspects of face-name learning with the goal of providing a comprehensive profile of monitoring performance during this task. Four types of monitoring judgments were solicited during encoding and retrieval of novel face-name associations. Across all of the monitoring judgments, relative accuracy was significantly above chance for face and name targets.

Spatial-frequency thresholds for configural and featural discriminations in upright and inverted faces.

Face recognition is thought to rely more on the relative positions of face features (configural information) than on the appearance of the individual face parts (featural information). It also seems to rely on a specific band of spatial frequencies (SFs). In this study, we measured the SFs needed for processing configural and featural information using the method of constant stimuli in combination with a simultaneous-matching paradigm.

Effects of familiarity on spatial frequency thresholds for face matching.

We examined whether familiarity with a face influences the spatial frequencies (SFs) required for face matching. Using the psychophysical method of constant stimuli and a 3AFC simultaneous matching paradigm, we obtained SF thresholds for familiar- and unfamiliar-face matching from fourteen observers, of which four were personally familiar with a subset of the faces while the remainder served as controls. SF thresholds from the lower extreme of the spectrum were approximately one octave lower for familiar than for unfamiliar faces, while SF thresholds from the upper extreme of the spectrum were approximately a third of an octave higher.