64 (1987) 93-100
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INTERFERENCE
WITH FACE NAMING * Brenda M. FLUDE, Andrew W. ELLIS
Andrew W. YOUNG, and Dennis C. HAY LancasterUniversity, UK
Accepted November 1985
Photographs of familiar faces and printed names of familiar people were combined to create four experimental conditions. These involved presentation of a face and the same person’s name, presentation of a face or a name only, presentation of a face and the name of an unrelated person drawn from a different occupational category, and presentation of a face and the name of a different person drawn from the same occupational category. Subjects were asked to name the faces or to name the printed names. The presence of faces had no …show more content…
effect on naming of the printed names, but the presence of incorrect printed names interfered with face naming. This interference effect was greater to names drawn from the same occupational category as the presented face. These interference effects are comparable to those found between pictures of objects and printed object names, with photographs of faces behaving like pictures of objects.
Introduction Picture-word interference forms a variant of the Stroop paradigm in which the presence of distractor words (usually object names) interferes with latencies for naming pictured objects, whereas the presence of distractor objects has little effect on latencies for naming printed words (Rosinski et al. 1975). Exploration of such interference effects has the potential to allow investigation of, and comparison between, the nature of processes involved in object and word recognition. The finer structure of picture-word interference effects has been investigated in a number of studies (e.g., Glaser and Diingelhoff 1984;
* This research was supported by a grant from Lancaster University’s Research Grant Fund. We are grateful to the Press Association for help in obtaining suitable photographs for use as stimuli, and for permission to reproduce the photographs used in fig. 1. Requests for reprints should be sent to A.W. Young, Psychology Dept., Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YF, England.
OOOl-6918/87/$3.50
0 1987, Elsevier Science Publishers
B.V. (North-Holland)
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Lupker and Katz 1981; Rayner and Posnansky 1978; Rosinski 1977; Smith and Magee 1980) and reviewed by Lupker (1985). However, the studies of picture-word interference have always used comparisons of printed words and line drawings of objects. In the present study we investigated whether or not the same types of interference effect would be found between photographs of faces and printed people’s names. Thus we distinguish object-word and face-name variants of the picture-word interference paradigm, and ask whether equivalent interference effects will be found in each case. It is not clear on a priori grounds whether or not faceename interference effects should be like object-word interference effects. The names that have to be given to objects may be ambiguous or may depend on the level of categorisation, whereas a face belongs to a particular person and hence possesses a single correct name that is often used. However, Hay and Young (1982), Ellis (1983, 1986). Young et al. (1986), and Bruce and Young (1986) have all proposed that names belonging to seen faces can only be accessed via an intervening semantic representation of the person seen, and a similar sequence is thought to hold in the case of object naming (Nelson et al. 1977; Seymour 1979; Warren and Morton 1982). In some other respects, faces might also be held to be potentially different from everyday objects. Identifying a person’s face, for instance, demands the ability to discriminate within a class of highly similar stimuli, whereas when we recognise everyday objects we often want to assign stimuli that might actually be rather different to each other to an equivalent functional category. Rosch (1978) and Rosch et al. (1976) refer to these as basic level categories. Recognition at the basic level would simply establish that a stimulus is a face, whereas usually we want to identify the individual faces known to us. It is thus an open question whether or not face-name interference effects will prove to be equivalent to object-word interference effects. In the present experiment we looked at interference effects when subjects were asked to name faces or to name printed names under four conditions representing different types of face and name combination. These involved presentation of a face and the name of the same person, a face or name in isolation, a face and the name of a different person belonging to a different occupational category, and a face and the name of a different person belonging to the same occupational category.
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Method Subjects Thirty-two adults (16 male, 16 female) acted as subjects. These were recruited from students or staff of Lancaster University. All were paid. Sixteen subjects (8 male, 8 female) were asked to name the photographed faces, and sixteen were asked to name the printed names. Stimuli and procedure Stimuli were derived from black and white press photographs of people famous in Britain. One more or less full face photograph of each of six politicians, six television personalities, and six pop stars was selected. Thus there were a total of eighteen faces of people drawn from three occupational categories, and these people’s names were used to create the printed names. The face in each photograph was surrounded by a circular template, in order to obscure as much of the clothing and background as possible, and rephotographed to a standard size. In object-word interference studies the words are usually placed inside outline drawings of the objects. However, in order not to obscure potentially informative parts of the faces, the printed names used in the present study were added alongside each face in a ‘speech bubble’. Half of the speech bubbles used in each condition of the experiment were added to the left of the face, and half to the right of the face. Names of the eighteen people used in the experiment were printed in clear block capital lettering. Examples of the resulting arrangement of names and faces are given in fig. 1. Four conditions were used in the experiment, representing different types of combination of faces and names: SAME PERSON: The name in the speech bubble was the name of the person whose face appeared in the circular template. FACE ONLY, OR NAME ONLY: The stimulus consisted of a face and a speech bubble containing only a question mark (when the subject’s task was to name the face), or of a printed name in a speech bubble and a blank circular template (when the subject’s task was to name the name). UNRELATED: The name in the speech bubble and the face in the circular template belonged to different people who were drawn from different occupational categories. RELATED: The name in the speech bubble and the face in the circular template belonged to different people drawn from the same occupational category. Examples of stimuli from the same person, unrelated, and related conditions are given in fig. 1. These face + name stimuli were presented to subjects one at a time on back projected slides. Each face subtended a visual angle of approximately 5”. Half the subjects were asked to name each face as quickly and as accurately as possible, and half
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Fig. 1. Examples of stimuli from the same person conditions used in the experiment.
(top), unrelated
(middle),
and related
(bottom)
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were asked to name (i.e., read aloud) each printed name as quickly and as accurately as possible. Naming latencies were recorded via a voice key, and errors noted. All subjects began with a warm-up involving two presentations of slides of each of the eighteen faces to be used in the experiment. During this warm-up they were reminded of any names they had difficulty recalling. Fifty-four trials were then run under each of the four experimental conditions. Trials in each of the conditions were interleaved with each other into an unpredictable order. Each of the faces and each of the names was used equally often in each condition; only the way in which faces and names were combined with each other differed across conditions. The first eighteen trials in each condition were regarded as involving practice with the stimuli used, and were not included in those analysed.
Results Error rates were less than 2% in all cells of the design; this was considered too low for formal analysis. Mean vocal response latencies (in milliseconds) for correct naming of faces or printed names in each experimental condition are presented in table 1. A two-factor analysis of variance was carried out, to determine the effects of stimulus Type (naming the faces or naming the names) and experimental Condition (same person, face or name only, unrelated, or related; repeated measure). This showed that printed names were named faster than faces (stimulus Type, F(1,30) = 162.26, p < O.OOl), and that naming latencies varied across experimental conditions (experimental Condition, F(3,90) = 31.15, p < 0.001). Both of these main effects were, however, modified by the presence of a stimulus Type X experimental Condition interaction (F(3,90) = 27.60, p < 0.001). Post hoc Tukey tests (CI = 0.05) were used to examine this stimulus Type X experimental Condition interaction. These showed that it was only the latencies for naming faces that varied across experimental conditions (Tukey critical difference = 42 msec). Thus the presence of printed names affected latencies for naming faces, whereas the presence of faces did not affect latencies for naming printed names. In considering how the latencies for naming faces varied across conditions it is useful to begin by comparing each condition to the condition in which no printed name
Table 1 Mean vocal response latencies (in milliseconds) printed names in each experimental condition. Same person Faces Names 881 591 Face only or name only 891 599
for correct
naming
of photographs
of faces or
Unrelated 980 596
Related 1027 600
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was present (face only condition), which acts as a control condition in which there is no potential interference. This showed that there was no difference between face naming latencies in the same person and face only conditions, whereas face naming latencies in the unrelated and in the related conditions were significantly longer than face naming latencies in the face only condition. This pattern can be summarised by stating that face naming latencies were slowed by the presence of incorrect printed names. In addition, however, face naming latencies in the related condition were found to be significantly longer than face naming latencies in the unrelated condition. Thus some types of incorrect printed name can slow face naming latencies more than others.
Discussion The presence of printed names was found to interfere with face .naming, whereas the presence of photographs of faces did not interfere with naming printed names. Despite the reasons for thinking that face recognition might differ from object recognition mentioned in the introduction to this report, this basic pattern is comparable to that found for object-word interference (Rosinski et al. 1975), with photographs of faces behaving like pictures of objects and printed people’s names behaving like printed object names. Not all printed names, however, produced an equal degree of interference with face naming; the name of a person drawn from the same category as the presented face would interfere more than the name of someone drawn from a different category. This effect is also observed in object-word interference. Rosinski (1977), for instance, found that distractor words belonging to the same semantic category as object pictures produced more interference than unrelated words, and Lupker (1979) and Glaser and Dtingelhoff (1984) obtained similar results. Thus faces again behave like other objects in being susceptible to this effect of the relatedness of distractor words on naming latencies. The pattern of face-name interference observed in the present experiment is consistent with the relative speed hypothesis (Smith and Magee 1980), which holds that the more quickly processed of two stimuli will interfere with the stimulus that is processed more slowly. However, recent results of other studies using object-word and Stroop interference tasks have cast doubt on this idea by showing that interference effects do not change across different stimulus onset asynchronies in the manner predicted by the relative speed hypothesis
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(Glaser and Diingelhoff 1984; Glaser and Glaser 1982) and that Stroop interference effects remain virtually unaltered across transformations that can considerably slow word naming latencies (Dunbar and MacLeod 1984). Such findings led Glaser and Diingelhoff (1984) to suggest that the relative speed hypothesis of picture-word interference should be replaced by one in which the interference effects are seen as reflecting the functional properties of the types of code in which information derived from pictures and words is represented. In terms of this hypothesis the results of the present experiment support the view that despite potential differences in the processes responsible for object and face recognition, information derived from objects and faces is coded into functionally equivalent forms.
References
Bruce, V.
and A.W. Young, 1986. Understanding face recognition. British Journal of Psychology, 17. Dunbar, K. and CM. MacLeod, 1984. A horse race of a different color: Stroop interference patterns with transformed words. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 10, 622-639. Ellis, H.D., 1983. ‘The role of the right hemisphere in face perception’. In: A.W. Young (ed.), Functions of the right cerebral hemisphere. London: Academic Press. pp. 33-64. Ellis, H.D., 1986. ‘Processes underlying face recognition’. In: R. Bruyer (ed.), The neuropsychology of face perception and facial expression. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Glaser, M.O. and W.R. Glaser, 1982. Time course analysis of the Stroop phenomenon. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 8, 875-894. Glaser, W.R. and F-J. Dtingelhoff, 1984. The time course of picture-word interference. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 10, 640-654. Hay, D.C. and A.W. Young, 1982. ‘The human face’. In: A.W. Ellis (ed.), Normality and pathology in cognitive functions. London: Academic Press. pp. 173-202. Lupker, S.J., 1979. The semantic nature of response competition in the picture-word interference task. Memory and Cognition 7, 485-495. Lupker, S.J., 1985. ‘Context effects in word and picture recognition: a reevaluation of structural models’. In: A.W. Ellis (ed.), Progress in the psychology of language, Vol. 1. London: Erlbaum. pp. 109-142. Lupker, S.J. and A.N. Katz, 1981. Input, decision and response factors in picture-word interference. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory 7, 269-282. Nelson, D.L., V.S. Reed and C.L. McEvoy, 1977. Learning to order pictures and words: a model of sensory and semantic encoding. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory 3, 485-497. Rayner, K. and C. Posnansky, 1978. Stages of processing in word identification. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 107, 64-80. Rosch,
E., 1978. ‘Principles of categorization’. In: E. Rosch and B. Lloyd (eds.), Cognition and categorization. Hillsdale, NJ: Edbaum. pp. 27-48.
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Rosch, E., C.B. Mervis, W.D. Gray, D.M. Johnson and P. Boyes-Braem, 1976. Basic obJects in natural categories. Cognitive Psychology 8, 382-439. Rosinski, R.R., 1977. Picture-word interference is semantically based. Child Development 48, 643-647. Rosinski, R.R., R.M. Golinkoff and K.S. Kukish, 1975. Automatic semantic processing in a picture-word interference task. Child Development 46, 247-253. Seymour, P.H.K., 1979. Human visual cognition. London: Collier-Macmillan. Smith, M.C. and L.E. Magee, 1980. Tracing the time course of picture-word processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 109, 373-392. Warren, C. and J. Morton, 1982. The effects of pruning on picture recognition. British Journal of Psychology 73, 117-129. Young, A.W., K.H. McWeeny, A.W. Ellis and D.C. Hay, 1986. Naming and categorizing faces and written names. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 38A, 297-318.