Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Learning with dynamic facial expressions often results in higher face recognition performance than with static images. However, few studies have used both positive and negative facial expressions to investigate the effects of dynamic facial expression information on recognition memory. The present study examined whether the effect of dynamic facial expressions depends on the type of facial expression used during the learning and recognition phases. Participants viewed individuals with smiling or angry expressions in either static or dynamic images in a learning session. Participants then performed a recognition task using static images with neutral, angry, or smiling expressions. The results showed that when tested with the neutral static faces, the advantage of the dynamic expression was observed regardless of the facial expression during learning (Experiment 1). However, when tested with the angry static faces, the dynamic expression advantage was not observed, but the recognition performance was better for the faces learned with the angry static faces (i.e., identical to the faces in the recognition task) (Experiment 2). In the recognition task with the static smiling faces, the advantage of dynamic expression was again observed in addition to the emotion congruency effect (i.e., better performance for the faces learned with the smiling expression) (Experiment 3). These results suggest that the effect of dynamic facial expression information on recognition depends on the type of facial expression during learning and recognition.