Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Associative memoiy for familiar faces was investigated in two experiments. Pairs of familiar faces were presented for deep or shallow encoding; memory for these pairs was tested by presenting old-intact pairs, old-recombined pairs, and pairs consisting of one or two new faces. In Experiment 1, pairs consisted of two different individuals whereas in Experiment 2, pairs consisted of different views of the same individual, ia both experiments, explicit recognition was best for old-intact pairs under deep encoding conditions. No associative priming effects were obtained in either experiment despite using a simultaneous familiarity-judgment task, similar to one that has produced associative priming effects with words (e.g., Goshen-Gottstein & Moscovitch, 1995a). It is proposed that the different associative priming effects obtained with the two types of stimuli may arise from differences in the modular perceptual representation systems for faces and words.