TITLE:
Carry-Over Effect of Processing Style: From Imagination Task to Recognition Task
AUTHORS:
Kyoko Hine, Yuji Itoh
KEYWORDS:
Carry-Over Effect, Global/Local Processing, Face Perception, Construal Level Theory
JOURNAL NAME:
Psychology,
Vol.7 No.6,
June
7,
2016
ABSTRACT: Accurately recognizing others’ faces is
very important for living successfully in the society. However, we often fail
to recognize them. What causes such a problem? Numerous psychological studies
reported that the performance of facial recognition was influenced by prior
mental activities, so-called carry-over effect. It is considered that mental
activities have two types of processing style, global processing and local
processing. Global processing refers to attend the general meaning of an event.
Local processing refers to attend to elements themselves. Recent studies showed
that prior mental activities requiring local processing interfered with face
recognition. However, it is still controversial whether or not this
interference on recognition occurs only in face recognition. Here, in order to
investigate if face is special for recognition, we conducted the experiments in
which participants were required a prior mental activity and a following
recognition task. As the prior mental activity, we used an imagination task in
which participants were asked to imagine a faraway place (global processing) or
a nearby place (local processing). The face and the scene picture recognition
tasks were used as recognition tasks. Our results showed that the accuracy of
face recognition after imagining the nearby place was worse than that after
imagining the faraway place. Additionally, the same pattern was observed for
scene picture recognition. The results suggest that local processing at the
imagination task was carried over into not only face recognition but also scene
recognition, and that local processing harmed these recognition tasks.