ABSTRACT
Remembering people is a crucial element of everyday life, both in social interaction and in work and family life. Memory for people differs from memory for objects in a number of ways. One of the most important differences is that person recognition demands identi®cation at the level of the individual, whereas for object recognition it is often suf®cient to identify the category. We commonly recognise someone as John Smith or as our next-door neighbour, but we recognise an apple as an apple, not as a particular apple. Recognising people as individuals allows us to behave consistently to the same person and differently to different people, but it is usually unnecessary to tune our behaviour so ®nely for individual apples. Although memory for faces, names, and voices form separate sections in this chapter, remembering people in everyday life frequently involves all of these as well as information about other aspects of their physical appearance, the context in which we encounter them, and their biographical details. It makes sense to think of memory for people as a single system in which all this information is integrated.
