Verbal description benefits for faces when description conditions are unknown a priori

Abstract

Some prior research has shown a benefit for describing nonverbal study stimuli, particularly faces, on a later recognition test relative to a control (no description) condition. In such studies, participants have known a priori whether a stimulus will need to be described, meaning that encoding differences other than the description could account for the effect. In Experiment 1, a description benefit was obtained for faces that could not be attributed to encoding differences. A direct manipulation of description duration, thus allowing more time to produce descriptors, did not influence the description effect. In Experiment 2, visual rehearsal instructions (without any verbal descriptions) failed to produce a rehearsal benefit. The experiments provide direct evidence against an account where the description or rehearsal enhances the featural information of nonverbal representations. For the present results, a benefit stemming from the encoding and retrieval of descriptors appears to be an attractive theoretical alternative over one that posits an enhancement or alteration of featural or holistic information.

Keywords:

• Recognition memory
• Description benefit
• Verbal facilitation
• Episodic face recognition
• Conjunction errors

Acknowledgments

We thank James C. Bartlett for providing helpful comments on this version of the manuscript, Kazuyo Nakabayashi for participating in a good discussion about her work and the topic, and Siegfried L. Sporer and anonymous reviewers for giving helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

Notes

¹ Two other procedures that have been used to get at issues regarding the use of featural or configural information include the manipulation of face orientation (i.e., upright vs. inverted, e.g., Carey & Diamond, 1977; Searcy & Bartlett, 1996; Valentine, 1988; Yin, 1969) and creating mathematical averages of faces (morphs; e.g., Busey & Tunnicliff, 1999; Cabeza & Kato, 2000; also see Galton, 1879). Inverting faces is thought to decrease or eliminate the extraction of holistic information (e.g., Diamond & Carey, 1986; Friere, Lee, & Symons, 2000; Searcy & Bartlett, 1996); creating morphs is thought to achieve a high level of study–test similarity while altering featural information, second-order configural information, and holistic information configuration (e.g., Busey & Tunnicliff, 1999; Cabeza & Kato, 2000).

² Although recollection might be used correctly to accept target faces as “old”, or perhaps incorrectly to exacerbate conjunction errors (via recollection of a feature or locally configural information), their data provided no compelling basis for such arguments.

³ We examined the list of studies covered by Meissner et al. (2008) for their meta-analyses. In support of Brown and colleagues' (2010) contention, studies that used multiple study faces with a description after each face produced either a benefit or a null effect (sometimes with a nonsignificant advantage of a description condition; e.g., Chance & Goldstein, 1976; Wogalter, 1991). We also note that the vast majority of studies in their meta-analyses used only a single study stimulus, which tends to be a procedure more common in the eyewitness/applied literature.

⁴ A different perspective was given by Winograd (1981). He suggested that a greater number of descriptors is beneficial because it increases the likelihood of describing one distinctive feature.

⁵ Because of our use of conjunction stimuli, head shape was considered a “feature”. Excluding head shape from the feature scores did not change our conclusions. The first and fourth author coded the descriptions independently; the authors produced similar coded scores, and the first author's scores were used for analyses.