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Memory and Faces: Pictures Help You Remember Who Said What

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Thomas Grimes

Kansas State University

Does having the pictures of political candidates help you remember the candidates' various positions on issues? The answer from three experiments was yes. Encoding specificity was ruled out because the pictures need not be present at the memory test for the benefit to accrue. Visual distinctiveness was ruled out because the benefit appears only for faces, not other distinctive visual stimuli. The data suggest that people use pictures to generate rough personality schemas (e.g., kindly), which are then used to help organize memory for the position statements. This account was supported by demonstrating that when asked, subjects generated a greater number of characteristics for candidates whose positions were accompanied by pictures than for candidates whose positions were unaccompanied by pictures. There was also a correlation between the number of characteristics generated and memory for the candidates' positions but only when the positions were accompanied by pictures (i.e., only when the putative schemas were generated). Implications are discussed for social psychology, memory, and mass communication.

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