ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the relationship between distinctiveness and episodic memory for unfamiliar faces. It reviews the results of empirical work on distinctiveness and recognition and discusses some of the explanations and models proposed to account for the results of the empirical studies. The chapter addresses the importance of the experimental context to understanding the nature of the relationship between distinctiveness and face recognition, including the effect of stimulus context and experimental design on memory for typical and distinctive faces. Face recognition is one area in which there is an apparently strong link between stimulus distinctiveness and memory. One of the most striking characteristics of the distinctiveness effect is that it is highly robust and appears to operate independently of other experimental manipulations. Although there is an implicit assumption that distinctiveness is judged relative to faces in the stimulus set, the instructions given to subjects often encourage a more 'absolute' form of judgement.
