Variability in appearance across different images of the same unfamiliar face often causes participants to perceive different faces. Because perceptual information is not sufficient to link these encounters, top-down guidance may be critical in the initial stages of face learning. Here we examine the interaction between top-down guidance and perceptual information when forming memory representations of unfamiliar faces. In two experiments, we manipulated the names associated with images of a target face that participants had to find in a search array. In Experiment 1, wrongly labelling two images of the same face with different names resulted in more errors relative to when the faces were labelled correctly. In Experiment 2, we compared this cost of mislabelling to the established ‘dual-target search cost’ where searching for two targets produces more search errors relative to one target. We found search costs when searching for two different faces, but not when searching for mislabelled images of the same face. Together, these results suggest that perceptual and semantic information interact when we in the form face memory representations Mislabelling the identity of perceptually similar faces does not cause dual representations to be created, but rather that it impedes the process of forming a single robust representation.

同一张陌生面孔的不同图像的外观差异通常会导致参与者感知到不同的面孔。由于感知信息不足以将这些遭遇联系起来，因此自上而下的指导在人脸学习的初始阶段可能至关重要。在这里，我们研究了在形成陌生面孔的记忆表征时自上而下的指导和感知信息之间的相互作用。在两个实验中，我们操纵了与参与者必须在搜索数组中找到的目标面部图像相关联的名称。在实验 1 中，错误地用不同名称标记同一张脸的两个图像会导致比正确标记人脸时更多的错误。在实验 2 中，我们将这种错误标记的成本与既定的“双目标搜索成本”进行了比较，其中搜索两个目标相对于一个目标会产生更多的搜索错误。我们在搜索两张不同的人脸时发现了搜索成本，但在搜索同一张人脸的错误标记图像时没有发现搜索成本。总之，这些结果表明，当我们形成人脸记忆表征时，感知和语义信息相互作用。错误地标记感知相似人脸的身份不会导致创建双重表征，而是阻碍了形成单一稳健表征的过程。