One of the most replicable findings reported in the social psychological literature is the cross-race memory effect. We argue this effect derives from higher-order interactions among social cues that determine the perceived relevance of a face to an observer. The current research tested this hypothesis by examining the combined influences of eye gaze direction and race on face memory. The physi...

We tested whether visual stimulus material that is assumed to be processed in different cortical networks during perception (i.e., faces and spatial positions) is also topographically dissociable during long-term memory recall. With an extensive overlearning procedure, 12 participants learned paired associates of words and faces and words and spatial positions. Each word was combined with eithe...

Building on previous studies of the effects of similarity on recognition memory for faces (e.g., Busey & Tunnicliff, 1999; Yotsumoto, Kahana, Wilson, & Sekuler, in press), we examined similarity’s role in the learning of novel face-name associations. In Experiment 1, subjects learned the names of synthetic faces that varied along four perceptual dimensions (Wilson, Loffler, & Wilkinson, 2002). ...

Complex pictorial information can be represented and retrieved from memory as mental visual images. Functional brain imaging studies have shown that visual perception and visual imagery share common neural substrates. The type of memory (short- or long-term) that mediates the generation of mental images, however, has not been addressed previously. The purpose of this study was to investigate th...

The neuropeptide Oxytocin influences a number of social behaviors, including processing of faces. We examined whether Oxytocin facilitates the processing of out-group faces and reduce the own-race bias (ORB). The ORB is a robust phenomenon characterized by poor recognition memory of other-race faces compared to same-race faces. In Experiment 1, participants received intranasal solutions of Oxyt...

Domain-general theories of autism rest on evidence that the disorder impacts not only social communication skills but also nonsocial functions such as memory. Yet recognition memory deficits have been inconsistently documented, especially for stimuli other than faces and sentences. Here we tested school-age children with high-functioning autism (ASD) and IQ, and age-matched comparison children ...