2009 Volume 6 Issue 2 Pages 143-153
The purpose of this study is to examine the asymmetric interference between facial expression recognition and identity recognition using a selective attention task (Garner paradigm). In Experiment 1, the participants judged either the expression or the identity of faces while the irrelevant dimension of identity or expression was either held constant or varied. Reaction times (RTs) for identity judgments were not influenced by the expression variations; however RTs for expression judgments were affected by the identity variations, independently of effects for facial distinctiveness and participant gender. Experiment 2 examines whether this asymmetric interference might be related to differences in the relative difficulties of making expression and identity judgments. The participants judged either the expression or the identity of morphing facial stimuli where the identity was more difficult to judge than the expression. The results of Experiment 2 indicated that RTs for expression judgments were not affected by the identity variations, and that RTs for identity judgments were also unaffected by the expression variations. These results suggest that differences in relative difficulty cannot account for the asymmetric interference between expression recognition and identity recognition.
