Article Summary
The article by Brédart and Barsics looks at the process by which people are able to recall semantic or episodic information about an individual upon exposure to their faces or voices. It has been determined that individuals attached semantic and even episodic information about people to their faces and voices and a later exposure of the person to the individual’s face or voice triggers a process that ends up with the individual recalling the information about the person.
Many studies have been carried out to look at the differences in recall performance between people exposed to faces and those exposed to voices. This article supports the notion that exposure to faces yields a much better performance than voice exposure in recalling of semantic and episodic information. It outlines a number of studies that have been done comparing the recall of information related to an individual after exposure to the person’s voice or face. Most of these studies support the overall better performance of face recognition over voice recognition in the recall of episodic and semantic information touching on another individual. The article goes on to further prove that face advantage is a real thing even when the target persons are not known to the test subjects and have just been introduced to the target subjects a few moments before.
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Research on recall of semantic information by individuals has been going on for a long time with researchers wanting to understand how exposure to the faces or voice increases familiarity and also makes it easier for the subject to recall the face/ voice and also attach the individual semantic information to the public. The article is more of a literature review for work involving recall of semantic information tied to facial and vocal recognition of an individual. The longer the exposure to the faces or voice, the higher the chances of the individual recalling the semantic information associated with the individual.
This article states most experiments they looked at have been between subject experiments. Based on what you read in chapter 1, what does that mean?
Between-subjects study design is a scenario where the participants in the experiment are separated so that different people test the different conditions being observed. Each participant can only give feedback on the single test condition they were exposed to. It is sometimes referred to as between-groups design. This is different from within-subjects study design where all the participants are exposed to the same set of conditions being tested and a feedback.
In most of the experiments analyzed in the article, the participants were placed in groups which were then exposed to faces and voices of different prominent people and celebrities after which the participants were asked to provide semantic information about the person and thereafter their name. the experiments would have one group of participants exposed to the faces and another group exposed to the voices and both groups asked to recall semantic information such as occupation about the person in the picture.
If you were doing these experiments would you prefer a between subject or within subject approach?
If conducting these experiments, a within-subjects approach would have been ideal. This is mainly because of the noise that is eliminated by the within-subjects approach. Participants in a study usually have background knowledge, personal issues and history which they carry with them into the study and can hugely affect their performance in the experiment. In the study for instance, a participant may have a higher than average memory of faces or voices compared to other participants and having them in one group or the other may lead to unreliable results. However, if the participant is allowed to test the two conditions, i.e. hear the voices and see the faces, the personal issues or attributes of the individual will not be a factor since they will be applied both ways.
The number of participants required for a within-subjects study is also fewer making the experiment easier to conduct. This is because each participant is allowed to test each condition and give feedback on both of them thus providing the researcher with data for each condition. In between-subjects design, two participants would be required to provide the same amount of data since each condition would need to have a different participant to take part in. Between-subjects also has its advantages over within-subjects although in this case I do not feel they are significant enough to warrant one to use the design over within-subjects.
On page 380 of the article research by Barsicks and Bredant (The 2012b article noted in the first full paragraph on the left side of the page) is discussed. How might you state the hypothesis they tested?
If groups of people are exposed to various semantic information about individuals in association with either a face, a voice, or both a face and a voice, the groups exposed to the face will perform better in recalling the identity-specific semantic information than the voice-only exposed group.
What are the dependent and independent variables in the study?
In an experimental study, the independent variable is that which the researcher can directly manipulate at his own discretion and also the variable whose change would cause a corresponding change in another variable. The dependent variable is the one whose reading varies with the amount of change in the independent variable.
In the study carried out, the length of exposure to the stimuli i.e. faces and voices can be the independent variable, while the dependent variable can be the memory-recall performance which could be measured by time taken to match the face/ voice to the occupation. This is because the researcher can easily increase or decrease the number of times the participant is shown the face or made to hear the voice is determined by the researcher. The quality of performance of the reaction to a change in in one season, meaning can be treated as the dependent variable.
