An ecological study of professors' memory for student names and faces: a replication and extension

This experiment measured university professors' memory for the names and faces of current and former students over a two-semester span. If courses function as contextual retrieval cues for professors to remember their students, the passing of each semester should diminish the distinctiveness of these cues. Based on the Bruce and Young (1986) model of face recognition, we hypothesised that as contextual cues become less distinctive, performance should suffer more on name recall tests than on name or face recognition tests. We found that name free recall and portrait-cued name recall declined very sharply after one semester (6 months), and face recognition declined after two semesters (12 months), whereas name recognition remained perfect. These results provide a general replication and extension of Bahrick (1984), and show that difficulties in recalling names cannot be due to any weakening of name representations in memory. We suggest that name recall may be dependent on contextual cues that become less distinctive with succeeding semesters.