Abstract

The spacing effect for the recognition of face-name pairs, faces and names was explored in Experiments 1a (focused attention) and 1b (divided attention). A lag 7 advantage was found across stimulus type under focused attention. When a tone monitoring task was introduce to divide attention, a robust spacing effect was found for faces, which was attenuated for face-name pairs but lost for names. Under focused attention involuntary processing for facial stimuli and voluntary processing for verbal (names) items accounted for the lag 7 advantage. When attention was divided, however, involuntary processing in the guise of study-phase retrieval remained unaffected explaining why a lag 7 advantage occurred for facial stimuli. Voluntary processing was prevented under divided attention which is why the lag 7 advantage for names was lost and attenuated for face-name pairs (the poor recognition performance for names was responsible for this). Another criterion which does not interfere with involuntary processing is age across the lifespan. In Experiment 2 a lag 7 advantage was explored for face recognition in a cohort of elderly adults. A robust spacing effect was found although face recognition performance decreased in comparison to younger adults tested in Experiment 1a. The contention that perceptual repetition priming is responsible for the lag 7 advantages incurred in face recognition was explored in Experiment 3a by changing the facial pose (from full-face to ¾ profiles or ¾ profiles to full-face) across presentations during the learning phase. At test faces were either full-face or ¾ profile poses. The lag 7 advantage was lost regardless of pose presented at test. It was assumed that participants were unable to ‘recognise’ the second presentation due to a structural change and therefore unable to process target repetitions. In Experiment 3b a forced repetition detection task was introduced during the learning phase. Despite detection, the lag 7 advantage remained lost. High detection scorers did not perform any better than low detection scorers. The division of low and high detection scorers showed that the spacing effect was independent of detection and recognition performance. Moreover, in the case of recognition for faces, the spacing effect relies on perceptual repetition priming. When the structural content of the face is the same across presentations, study-phase retrieval operates and produces a robust lag 7 advantage. In the case of the names, deficient-processing best accounts for the spacing effects seen because when voluntary processing is prevented, the lag 7 advantage is lost.