Faces and spoken names from our
study of face-name association learning
J Huang, M J Kahana & R Sekuler

Learning to associate a name with a person's face is an important everyday skill.
Most people find that it's also a difficult skill --a very difficult skill.

To study how people learn name-face associations, we exploit specially-chosen names
and specially-designed faces. These stimuli allow us to control how similar the faces are
to one another, and how similar the names are to one another. That's important as similarity
can be a major obstacle to learning names and faces. Just think what it would be like
at a large family reunion where you were meeting distant relatives for the first time,
relatives who, because of their family resemblance, look very much alike.

Our study of face-name learning used19 spoken Mandarin names. In the audio below,
to highlight the differences among the names, they are grouped here by their initial consonant.
Also, successive spoken names are separated by 500 msec of silence. Click on the controller
below to start the audio sequence.

To see the 19 "Wilson faces" that were used in our study click here. For details of the rationale and
construction of Wilson faces, see Galster, Kahana, Wilson & Sekuler (2009).

e-mail to Jie Huang for further information