Document Type

Honors Project

First Advisor

Janna Young

Degree Award Date

Spring 2011

Keywords

Visual Cues, Auditory Cues, Animated Character Naming, Movie Naming, name recall, name recognition

Disciplines

Cognition and Perception | Cognitive Psychology | Psychology

Abstract

There are many stimuli that influence how well a person is able to identify a face, including the familiarity of the face, facial features, and voice of the person. These stimuli also play an important role in the ability to recall the person's name. We investigated how physical appearance and voice impact participants' ability to recall and recognize the names of famous people as portrayed by animated movie characters. Eighty participants were asked to recall the names of actors portraying animated characters presented one at a time in thirty-second animated movie clips, name the movie title, and recognize the actor's names. This was a 2x2 design with type of cue (visual vs. auditory) and type of character (non-look-alike vs. look-alike). Naming accuracy was the dependent variable. It was hypothesized that the auditory only clips and/or the non-lookalike characters would have the lowest naming accuracy; whereas look-alike characters would augment recall and recognition accuracy. Results showed a significantly higher accuracy in the movie title recall task compared to both actor recall and recognition tasks. As expected, actor recognition was significantly higher than actor recall. The type of character (look-alike vs. non-look-alike) had a significant effect on actor recall and recognition, but the type of cue (visual/auditory vs. auditory only) did not. Furthermore, there was a significant interaction between type of cue and type of character on the two recall tasks. Highest accuracy was achieved when the actor did not resemble the animated character. The auditory look-alike condition was the most difficult.

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