Using visual imagery to manipulate recognition memory for faces whose appearance has changed.

ABSTRACT: Real-world recognition requires our memory system to accommodate perceptual changes that occur after encoding; for example, eyewitnesses must recognize perpetrators across changes in appearance. However, it is not clear how this flexible recognition ability can be improved: Standard encoding strategies not only tend to be ineffective, but can in fact be detrimental for recognizing people across appearance changes. Given the effectiveness of visual imagery in creating and modifying memory representations, we examined whether counterfactual visual imagery could be used to manipulate flexible recognition by simulating an increase in encoding-retrieval similarity. Across two experiments, participants (n = 317) encoded faces with neutral expressions and were cued to imagine the faces with eithe

SUBMITTER: Ramey MM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12484523 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature