University of Southampton: Cognitive Sciences Centre
Wednesday 4 February 1998 - Room 3113 - 4.00 pm, Level 3, Shackleton Building
Implicit Memory for Faces and Objects
Professor Vicki Bruce
Dept of Psychology
University of Stirling
vb1 at stir.ac.uk
ABSTRACT: Repeated items, whether faces, objects or words, are
easier to recognise than those seen for the first time in a
particular experiment. This "repetition priming" effect is an
interesting form of implicit memory, which we explain in terms of
structural changes within the system which stores item
representations. Priming occurs within domains (e.g. faces prime
faces) but not between them (e.g. names do not prime faces).
However, the extreme longevity of the priming of face recognition
is much more difficult to explain in these terms. Familiar faces
first seen weeks or months earlier in the laboratory are easier to
recognise in a test phase than those encountered for the first time
at test, even though all items might have been encountered in the
interval, diluting any priming effect.
In this talk I will describe a series of recent experiments on face
and object priming which examines how implicit memory for faces and
objects is affected by changes in context between prime and test
encounters.
Professor VICKI BRUCE studied experimental psychology at Cambridge (BA,
Natural Sciences, 1974) and completed her PhD in 1977 at the MRC
Applied Psychology Unit, supervised by Alan Baddeley.
She worked briefly as a demonstrator at the University of Newcastle
upon Tyne before moving to the University of Nottingham in 1978, where
she spent 14 years as lecturer, reader and professor. She moved to
Stirling in 1992, where she is currently Deputy Principal. She has
published extensively on her research topic of face perception, and on
other aspects of visual perception and cognition.