The representation of emotional and personal significance in person-specific knowledge

We interact with people everyday and much of this interaction requires easy access to information about those people. Particularly important in current research is the influence of personal and emotional significance. Recent research has shown that personal memories can facilitate access to information about famous people. However, we do not know how these personal memories interact with our emotional responses to people, nor is it clear at what stages in the face recognition process these factors have their greatest influence. The aim of this project is to examine the contribution of these variables in accessing knowledge about people.
Three studies are proposed;

The first will focus on our emotional responses to famous people to determine whether this variable improves our ability to recognise faces as familiar and to access;
biographical information (eg occupation);
The second will examine the influence of personal significance when making familiarity and semantic judgements;
The final study addresses questions about the independent and combined influence of emotional and personal significance in face recognition.
These issues will be examined in healthy adults and people with prosopagnosia using behavioural and eye tracking measures.