Browsing by Person "Martin, Douglas"

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Categorical proactive interference effects occur for faces
(2010-11) Darling, Stephen; Martin, Douglas; Macrae, C. Neil
Recent research has demonstrated that proactive interference (PI) between the names of familiar individuals in a memory task is category specific, and that subsequent release from proactive interference (RPI) is a useful tool for investigating the underlying categorisation of memory for people. These RPI effects are in line with the influential Interactive Activation and Competition (IAC) model of person recognition, which predicts the existence of such categorical effects. Here we report an experiment precisely replicating the categorical PI and RPI effects found previously for occupational categories, but using faces instead of names as stimuli. The results underscore the use of PI as a tool to investigate semantic categorisation, are compatible with models proposing a single point of access to semantic information about people and provide further evidence for the categorical organisation of person knowledge. 2010 Psychology Press.
Processing orientation and Emotion Recognition
(American Psychological Association, 2012-02) Martin, Douglas; Slessor, G.; Allen, R.; Phillips, L. H.; Darling, Stephen
There is evidence that some emotional expressions are characterised by diagnostic cues from individual face features. For example, an upturned mouth is indicative of happiness, while a furrowed brow is associated with anger. The current investigation explored whether motivating people to perceive stimuli in a local (i.e., feature-based) rather than global (i.e., holistic) processing orientation was advantageous for recognising emotional facial expressions. Participants classified emotional faces while primed with local and global processing orientations, via a Navon-letters task. Contrary to previous findings for identity recognition, the current findings are indicative of a modest advantage for face emotion recognition under conditions of local processing orientation. When primed with a local processing orientation, participants performed significantly better on an emotion recognition task than when they were primed with a global processing orientation. The impacts of this finding for theories of emotion recognition and face processing are considered.
Some witnesses are better than others
(2009-09) Darling, Stephen; Martin, Douglas; Hellmann, Jens Hinrich; Memon, Amina
This paper reports a single study in which individual differences in visual processing were assessed in comparison with participants' ability to identify a culprit from a lineup. There were two parts to the study, separated by several weeks. In the first part, participants were asked to report on the global and local aspects of stimuli (first used by Navon (1977)) comprising large letters made up of small individual letters. Measures were taken of the degree of interference caused when the letters conflicted (e.g. a large letter P composed of small letter Ss). In the second part of the study, participants viewed a video of a crime, and subsequently attempted to identify the culprit from a lineup. We found that there was an association between the interference caused by conflicting global information when participants were reporting local letters, and identification performance. Those participants that were most susceptible to global interference identified the culprit more often than those who were the least susceptible to conflicting global information. These results establish a relationship between an individual differences measure of global/local processing and eyewitness recognition performance, suggesting that participants with a relative global processing bias might make better eyewitnesses. 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.