We examined the influence of social anxiety on memory for both identity and emotional expressions of unfamiliar faces. Participants high and low in social anxiety were presented with happy and angry faces and were later asked to recognise the same faces displaying a neutral expression. They also had to remember what the initial expressions of the faces had been. Remember/know/guess judgements w...

The present study was aimed at evaluating whether the very high accuracy of memory for familiar faces, demonstrated by Ge et al (2003, Perception 32 601-614) with a very familiar famous person, generalises to faces of personally known individuals. The accuracy of participants' perceptual memory for a close colleague's face and for their own face was evaluated by presenting original and manipula...

The question whether the recognition of individual faces is mandatory or task-dependent is still controversial. We employed the N250r component of the event-related potential as a marker of the activation of representations of facial identity in visual memory, in order to find out whether identity-related information from faces is encoded and maintained even when facial identity is task-irrelev...

In the attentional boost effect, participants encode images into memory as they perform an unrelated target-detection task. Later memory is better for images that coincided with a target rather than a distractor. This advantage could reflect a broad processing enhancement triggered by target detection, but it could also reflect inhibitory processes triggered by distractor rejection. To test the...

The majority of mood-congruent memory research has confirmed the existence of a memory bias for affectively toned words or phrases. However, the current study investigated a memory bias for emotional facial expressions, in induced and naturally occurring mood states. In experiment 1 twenty-five dysphoric participants and twenty non-dysphoric participants were presented with a set of emotional f...

At a glance, one can often determine whether a face belongs to a known individual. To investigate brain mechanisms underlying this memory feat, we recorded EEG signals time-locked to face presentations. In the study phase, 40 unknown faces were presented, 20 of which were accompanied by a voice simulating that person speaking. Instructions were to remember the faces with spoken biographical inf...

Past research shows that adults often display poor memory for racially ambiguous and racial outgroup faces, with both face types remembered worse than own-race faces. In the present study, the authors examined whether children also show this pattern of results. They also examined whether emerging essentialist thinking about race predicts children's memory for faces. Seventy-four White children ...

We examined age-related differences in memory for identity and emotional expression of unfamiliar faces. Younger and older adults were presented with happy and angry faces and were later asked to recognise the same faces displaying a neutral expression. When a face was recognised, they also had to remember what the initial expression of the face had been. In addition, states of awareness associ...

We tested the ability of white participants to encode and retain over a brief period of time information about the identity of white and black people, using faces as stimuli in a standard change detection task and tracking neural activity using electroencephalography. Neural responses recorded over the posterior parietal cortex reflecting visual working memory activity increased in amplitude as...