Levels of processing 30 years on: a special issue of memory. M. A. Conway (Ed.). Psychology Press, Hove and New York, 2002. No. of pages 119. ISBN 1-84169-934-9. Price £29.95 (hardback).

✍ Scribed by Brian R. Clifford

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2004
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 43 KB
• Volume: 18
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0888-4080
• DOI: 10.1002/acp.1010

✦ Synopsis

In an indirect way chapter eight takes up the question of whether faces are indeed unique among objects to be recognized. It does this by comparing findings and methodologies from the person perception or eyewitness testimony literature with the experimental face processing literature. This is potentially a fruitful enterprise even if only for the fact that it has to remain an inconclusive one for the moment. The reason for this is that the methodology used in the person perception literature, though commendable in its use of dynamic and realistic stimulus footage (compared with say the use of static and sometimes hand drawn pictures in the face processing literature), tends to be less homogenous than the methods traditionally used in the face recognition literature.

Nevertheless there would seem to be a laudable suggestion here for traditional face processing studies to use more realistic materials so that a comparison in findings, such as the finding, unlike in the case of face recognition performance, of an apparent absence of a dip in person recognition performance between 10 and adulthood, becomes more of a true option. The final chapter continues with the theme of the context in which our investigations take place by examining the face recognition accuracy in children who set about their task in rather different circumstances including those with and without the more obvious social demand characteristics. In this it presents a helpful reminder to the reader of the potential competence-performance divide in development research.

In summary the book falls somewhat short of its promise to provide a bridge in the form of presenting research findings or proposing research questions derived by those concerned with the general development of visuo-spatial cognition for the field of experimental face processing. However, the book makes up for this to an important extent by providing much stimulating material to the reader with applied interests in face recognition.