Navon Letters Affect Face Learning and Face Retrieval

Identifying the local letters of a Navon letter (a large letter made up of smaller different letters) prior to recognition causes impairment in accuracy, while identifying the global letters of a Navon letter causes an enhancement in recognition accuracy (Macrae & Lewis, 2002). This effect may result from a transfer-inappropriate processing shift (TIPS) (Schooler, 2002). The present experiment extends research on the underlying mechanism of this effect by exploring this Navon effect on face learning as well as face recognition. The results of the two experiments revealed that when the Navon task used at retrieval was the same as that used at encoding then the performance accuracy is enhanced, whereas when the processing operations mismatch at retrieval and at encoding, this impairs recognition accuracy. These results provide support for the TIPS explanation of the Navon effect.