Friday March 8, 13:40 - 14:30

Response conformity formation in face recognition memory

Research suggests that the presence of one witness influences others. The present study examined the effect of conformity to another response in face recognition memory test. During the experiment, a target person, never seen by the subjects, came to the classroom and asked the subjects to answer a questionnaire, which was not concerned with this study. About four months later, the subjects were asked to rate the similarity between the face of target and the set of other’s faces. In the experimental conditions subjects participated in pairs. However, only one was a real subject and another was a confederate of experimenters pretending to be a subject. The two were asked to report aloud a judged similarity between a face that was sequentially displayed by a slide projector and the target’s face that was not displayed but remembered from memory. The set of faces displayed did not include the face of target. An experimenter always asked a confederate to respond first and then asked a real subject. The responses of confederates were under full experimental control. In control condition subjects were just asked to rate the similarity between the remembered target’s face and a set of face displayed. One week later, all the subjects were again asked to rate similarities between the remembered target’s face and a new set of smiling faces, consisting of the persons who were in the prior similarity rating task, new persons, and the target. The results showed that in the experimental condition the subjects showed strong conformity to the responses of another person, and the effect of conformity remained one week after the first rating task. In the second experiment the similarity values given by a confederate were changed to test the generality of the effect. The result again showed a strong conformity effect.