The impact of cognitive style on face recognition and face matching

Cognitive style differentiates individuals on their preferred or habitual way of processing given information and is likely to affect how people process faces. There are three main components in literature, which debated whether face recognition is a holistic or analytic cognitive process. There is some evidence to suggest that categorisation of Navon letters can induce holistic or analytic processing of faces, and demonstrates an accuracy advantage in the former condition (Perfect et al., 2008). However, this effect is not consistently found (Lawson, 2007) and some other studies also suggest that face processing relies on a featural analysis (Megreya & Burton, 2006). Though previous research has examined short term manipulations of cognitive style on face processing, inherent style is yet to be examined. In this study, two experiments examined face processing using a recognition memory task with initially unfamiliar faces and participants were classified on their Holist-Analytic processing style. In Experiment one, participants who were more analytic in style recorded fewer false alarms than those who had a holistic processing style, however both participant groups had similar performance overall. Experiment two replicated the study findings and new participants used a speeded version of the task. In face matching experiments three and four the memory aspect of the face recognition was eliminated. The findings fit well with approaches that consider unfamiliar faces to be processed primarily on a featural basis, but are surprising given earlier Navon type studies where biasing participants towards a holistic style appeared to improve recognition.