How general is the incongruity effect in social episodic memory?

Abstract

Research findings suggest that people remember reputational information that is incongruent to their expectations particularly well. However, in most of these experiments, the same facial images were used during both the learning and testing phases. This raises the question of whether participants truly recognised the individuals (identity recognition) or merely remembered specific pictorial details. The present experiment investigated whether changing the viewing perspective during the testing phase would yield similar results compared to a control condition using the classical design (i.e., identical facial images during learning and testing). The results revealed a source memory advantage for cheaters in both the changed perspective and the control condition. These findings suggest that participants did not rely solely on pictorial details but were able to recognise the individuals and recall their cheating behaviour.