Over the years there has been a wide amount of research into the differences in face processing, particularly our ability to retrieve information from faces. It has often been found that people find it easier to retrieve semantic information froma face than it is to retrieve a name, and psychologists have proposed several different theories as to why this is. In 1986, Bruce and Young first put forward their model of familiar face processing, and in the decades that followed it has been widely accepted as an explanation for the differences in name retrieval compared to semantic retrieval. However, the research is conflicting, and there is some evidence to suggest that this theory may not be completely accurate. This essay aims to give an overall explanation of Bruce and Young’s face processing model, and provide some critical evaluation of the model by analysing both the supporting and conflicting evidence.
Bruce and Young’s (1986) model of familiar face processing consists of several stages. The first process to take place is structural encoding, in which the brain takes in the basic features of the face in order to determine whether or not the face is familiar. If it is an unfamiliar face, there are only 3 additional processes which can take place: expression analysis, facial speech analysis, and directed visual processing (DVP). Expression analysis allows an individual to gain information about emotional state (i.e. whether the person they are looking at is happy, sad, or angry), while facial speech analysis allows them to see whether the person is talking by looking at their lip and jaw movements. DVP involves focusing attention on a specific feature or physical property, such as focusing on a particular face in a crowd. These processes are all that can take place if the face presented is unfamiliar, however, if the face is familiar, a different set of processes will first take place in order to identify the person. First of all the face recognition units must access stored structural information in order to determine that the face presented has been seen before, then the person identity nodes can access semantic information specific to the individual they are seeing, and finally they will be able to retrieve the individual’s name.
According to Bruce and Young, these processes must Occur in a serial manner, implying that it should be impossible to retrieve a person’s name before semantic information, and several further studies have provided evidence to support this. One such study conducted by Young, Hay and Ellis (1985) used diary studies to record people’s ability to recall information from a face. Participants were asked to record any difficulties or errors they made in recognition over 8 weeks, and it was found that there were no instances in which a participant could name a face but not recall the semantic information of the individual. However, this study was based entirely on the participants own account of their experience, and so there is a risk that some data was missed or inaccurately recorded. Another study was conducted more recently by Old and Naveh (2012) which looked at adult’s ability to learn names.
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Although the study did not directly test the difference between recall of semantic information compared to name recal, they did find that participants’ name recall abilities were greatly improved when they were also provided with additional character information, giving more support to Bruce and Young’s theory. A final study conducted in 1997 by Scanlan and Johnston provided some conflicting information. They tested the speed at which participants were able to match faces to names or semantic details (in this case occupation) using both adult and child participants. As predicted, they found that the adult participants were significantly faster at matching faces to occupations, rather than names. All of these studies provide some strong supporting evidence for Bruce and Young’s theory. Although they all used relatively small sample sizes and may have had some issues with data collection, they still collected consistent results to suggest that the process of face recognition Occurs in a serial manner.
However, in the same study by Scanlan and Johnston (1997), it was found that the children who took part were faster at matching names to faces rather than matching occupations, which goes against Bruce and Young’s theory. If the process of name recall Occurs in a serial manner, it shouldn’t be possible for the children to recall names faster than an occupation. The results of this theory imply that the meaningfulness of the semantic information also has a role in affecting recall ability, as to children, the name of an individual will mean more than their occupation. This idea is further supported by Cohen’s 1990 study, in which the meaningfulness of the semantic information was manipulated. It was found that if participants were given meaningful semantic details, they were able t recall those faster than a name. However, if the semantic detail was not meaningful to them, name recall occurred faster.
A further, more recent study conducted in 2005 (Brédart, Brennen, Delchambre, McNeill & Burton) tested a group of participants on their ability to recall information about their colleagues. Despite the fact that the participants had constant access to information about their colleagues’ nationality and education level, it was found that they were able to recall the names significantly faster than any semantic information. These results do not fit with Bruce and Young’s theory and provide some different insight into how our brains process information about an individual. Familiarity and meaningfulness seem to have more of an effect than was originally thought and may be responsible for some of the differences in results for different studies. For example, in studies involving the recollection of celebrity names (Brennen, Baguley, Bright & Bruce, 1990), participants are only able to retrieve the name after being presented with semantic information because it is more meaningful. Whereas in studies where participants are presented with the faces of friends (Brédart et al, 2005), it is easier to recall the name as that is more meaningful to the participants.
In conclusion, there is varying evidence on this topic. There are a number of different studies which support the claims first made by Bruce and Young, showing that the theory is valid and can often be used to accurately predict behaviour. However, it is clear that some parts of their theory are inaccurate in some situations. In particular, it seems that their theory does not apply to younger children (Scanlan & Johnston, 1997), which could suggest that the way our brains process and retrieve information from faces could change and develop over time. As well as this, the meaningfulness of a person’s name compared to the meaningfulness of other semantic information can also have an effect, providing further evidence that Bruce and Young’s theory is inaccurate. It seems that although the three main processes they originally set out do commonly occur in one set order, it is not a serial process and there are some situations in which names can be retrieved more easily than semantic information.
