title: Identity modulates short-term memory for facial emotion.
abstract: For some time, the relationship between processing of facial expression and facial identity has been in dispute. Using realistic synthetic faces, we reexamined this relationship for both perception and short-term memory. In Experiment 1, subjects tried to identify whether the emotional expression on a probe stimulus face matched the emotional expression on either of two remembered faces that they had just seen. The results showed that identity strongly influenced recognition short-term memory for emotional expression. In Experiment 2, subjects' similarity/dissimilarity judgments were transformed by multidimensional scaling (MDS) into a 2-D description of the faces' perceptual representations. Distances among stimuli in the MDS representation, which showed a strong linkage of emotional expression and facial identity, were good predictors of correct and false recognitions obtained previously in Experiment 1. The convergence of the results from Experiments 1 and 2 suggests that the overall structure and configuration of faces' perceptual representations may parallel their representation in short-term memory and that facial identity modulates the representation of facial emotion, both in perception and in memory. The stimuli from this study may be downloaded from http://cabn.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.
authors.affiliation: Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts 02454, USA.
authors.forename: Murray
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Galster
authors.forename: Michael J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Kahana
authors.forename: Hugh R
authors.initials: HR
authors.lastname: Wilson
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Sekuler
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology