Haven't we met before? The effect of facial familiarity on repetition priming

Within the word recognition literature, word‐frequency and hence familiarity has been shown to affect the degree of repetition priming. The current paper reports two experiments which examine whether familiarity also affects the degree of repetition priming for faces. The results of Experiment 1 confirmed that familiarity did moderate the degree of priming in a face recognition task. Low familiarity faces were primed to a significantly greater degree than high familiarity faces in terms of accuracy, speed, and efficiency of processing. Experiment 2 replicated these results but additionally, demonstrated that familiarity moderates priming for name recognition as well as face recognition. These results can be accommodated within both a structural account of repetition priming (Burton, Bruce & Johnston, 1990) and an Episodic Memory account of repetition priming (see Roediger, 1990), and are discussed in terms of a common mechanism for priming, learning and the representation of familiarity