How are faces recalled from memory?

Imagine this scenario. You get in an elevator, and the person next to you seems familiar, but you can't quite place the face. After considering several alterantives, you finally realize that they are a person that you regularly see at a local health club.

How did you recover this information from memory? One possibility is that you used the person's face to repeatedly query memory in order to find a match. An alternative is that there are separate memory systems: one that is responsible for the rush of familiarity, and teh second for recovering the context and other information about the person.

In the memory literature, evidence is growing that we use two memory systems to solve this problem. Lots of researchers have tried different techniques to probe this distinction, including EEG recordings, remember/know judgments, and fitting ROC functions. However, we took a different approach. We used natrualistic faces with known stimulus properties that were created using a morphing process.

An Experiment

more details to follow