Abstract
Unusual faces are recognized easily. We wanted to see whether this effect of distinctiveness can be extended to other characteristics of the person. Exp. 1 involved episodic recognition tasks (faces, activities, names) and recall of the name or the activity of persons. The material was either distinctive (male faces, activities dealing with the circus, rare names) or typical. Results tend to show the effect is face-specific. Exp. 2 was designed to control the face distinctiveness on the recall tasks and to search for effects of the task order. We replicated and extended the results of Exp. 1. In Exps. 1 and 2, the distinctiveness of the faces was defined by the experimenters. So, in Exp. 3 distinctiveness was established by independent judges. Results show the effect is specific to faces. The three experiments suggest also that the distinctiveness of associations is independent of that of their components.
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