Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A repeated finding in the literature of face recognition is thatexpressive faces are remembered better than neutral faces.However, a better facial-identity recognition may come at acost of a reduced precision with which the pictorial facial fea-tures, irrelevant for identity recognition, are represented inmemory. By means of a continuous-report task, we testedthis hypothesis by measuring the memory precision of ex-pressive and neutral faces. Commensurable face-identity andfacial-expressions variations were generated with the methodof Fechnerian scaling. The results confirm our hypothesis, butonly under conditions of high memory load. We interpret thepresent findings as due to the effects of the categorical pro-cesses required for facial-identity recognition.