Abstract
Most individuals more easily recall the occupation of an acquaintance than that person's name. Three experiments (ns = 117, 42, and 36) were designed to investigate whether this shortcoming arises because people are likely to ignore any meaningful information provided by a name. In Exp. 1 college students viewed a series of faces, each given a name and occupation rated high or low in imageability. The students were told to picture the names, picture the occupations or were given no picturing instructions. In Exp. 2 the same words were identified as occupations of depicted individuals for some participants and as names for others. In Exp. 3 students wrote words that came to mind in response to words sometimes labeled as names and sometimes as occupations. Analysis showed that occupations were recalled better than names (Exps. 1 and 2). Picturing instructions improved face-name but not face-occupation recall (Exp. 1). Increased imageability enhanced occupation but not name recall (Exps. 1 and 2), and college students produced more associations to words labeled as occupations than the same words labeled as names (Exp. 3). These results suggest that people ignore the most meaningful sense of a name, contributing to poor face-name recall.
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