Authors: Sarah J Casey Fiona N Newell
Publish Date: 2005/06/28
Volume: 166, Issue: 3-4, Pages: 583-591
Abstract
Recent studies have suggested that the familiarity of a face leads to more robust recognition at least within the visual domain The aim of our study was to investigate whether face familiarity resulted in a representation of faces that was easily shared across the sensory modalities In Experiment 1 we tested whether haptic recognition of a highly familiar face one’s own face was as efficient as visual recognition Our observers were unable to recognise their own face models from tactile memory alone but were able to recognise their faces visually However haptic recognition improved when participants were primed by their own live face In Experiment 2 we found that shortterm familiarisation with a set of previously unfamiliar face stimuli improved crossmodal recognition relative to the recognition of unfamiliar faces Our findings suggest that familiarisation provides a strong representation of faces but that the nature of the information encoded during learning is critical for efficient crossmodal recognition
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