Kira Noad and Timothy J. AndrewsPlease use the format "First name initials family name" as in "Marie S. Curie, Niels H. D. Bohr, Albert Einstein, John R. R. Tolkien, Donna T. Strickland"
<p>Although the ability to recognise familiar faces is a critical part of everyday life, the process by which a face becomes familiar in the real world is not fully understood. Previous research has focussed on the importance of perceptual experience. However, in natural viewing, perceptual experience with faces is accompanied by increased knowledge about the person and the context in which they are encountered. Although contextual information is known to be crucial for the formation of new episodic memories, it requires a period of consolidation. It is unclear, however, whether a similar process occurs when we learn new faces. Using a natural viewing paradigm, we will investigate how the context in which events are presented influences our understanding of those events and whether, after a period of consolidation, this has a subsequent effect on face recognition. The context will be manipulated by presenting events in 1) the original sequence, or 2) a scrambled sequence. Although this manipulation is predicted to have a significant effect on the understanding the context of events, it will have no effect on overall visual experience with the faces. Our prediction is that contextual understanding will affect face recognition after the information has been consolidated into memory.</p>
face, recognition, memory, consolidation
