Skin conductance response and the recognition of facial stimuli

The purpose of the present study was to determine whether or not subject's physiological responsiveness could be used as an index of their "knowledge" of a series of facial photographs with varying degrees of associated contextual memories.; A review of the literature examined a four-stage model of face recognition presented by Damasio, Tranel and associates. This model hypothesizes that face recognition is achieved by the ability of an individual to retrieve contextual memories about a given stimulus in order to attain recognition.; The current study examined this thesis by presenting subjects with a series of facial photographs accompanied by varying degrees of contextual memories; i.e., no contextual memories, a proper name, or a proper name and additional background information.; Results indicated that subjects responded with a higher skin conductance (SC) magnitude when the face had a proper name associated with it, but did not respond with higher SC response magnitude when additional background information was provided. Results also indicated that subjects' SC response magnitude to those faces which they could not verbally recognize was similar to those faces which they could correctly recognize, and significantly greater than the SC response magnitude for faces which they had not seen before.