Image Memory for Faces and Objects

Abstract

There exists both in the literature, and in the wider world, an assumption that humans are good at recognising faces. Many tasks have been used to show, however, that although this may be the case for familiar faces, it does not appear to be so for unfamiliar faces. Memory has been shown to be accurate for faces when small numbers of images are used, however recent research has demonstrated that long-term visual memory capacity for objects is very good even for vast numbers of images. In the current study, we compare memory for specific images of objects and faces, and show that memory for objects is better than for faces. Familiar faces are remembered better than unfamiliar faces, but not as well as objects. Where previous studies seemed to show an advantage for faces over objects in memory tasks, the requirement to remember a specific image appears to reverse this effect.