Abstract
This Registered Report pertains to the face-name matching effect (Zwebner et al. 2017), according to which people can match the first name to an unknown target face above chance level. The purpose of the Registered Report was twofold: (i) to perform an independent conceptual replication of the face-name matching effect, and (ii) to establish the nature of the effect. To this end, undergraduate students were presented with uniform pictures of unfamiliar faces of similar age and ethnicity and asked to select these targets' first names among two alternatives that were equated for length. Half of the trials constituted target trials, in which a face was accompanied by the true name of the depicted person and a filler name. The other half constituted sibling trials, in which a face was accompanied by the name of the same-sex sibling of the depicted person and a filler name. The target trials were meant to establish the generalizability of the face-name matching effect. If participants could reliably match a person's true name to their face with these homogeneous materials, it would indicate that it is a pervasive effect that extends obvious ethnic, cultural, and zeitgeist differences. The sibling trials were meant to establish whether the effect extends to sibling names. If participants could also reliably match a face and the name of the depicted person's sibling, it would indicate that we entertain stereotypes for types of names, of which individual names could be regarded as tokens. Such a finding would be in line with predictions from the field of socio-onomastics, according to which names are vehicles for social meaning creation that are systematically governed by the socioeconomic characteristics of the name givers. If the face-name matching effect for target trials were to exceed that of sibling trials, this would constitute evidence that names also carry additional, individuating information. Our results provided no conclusive evidence in support of either the face-name matching effect or an analogous effect involving sibling names. Although participants' accuracy in identifying true names and sibling names slightly exceeded chance, these effects were not statistically significant, and Bayesian analyses yielded inconclusive evidence. Moreover, no significant difference was found between performance on target versus sibling trials, and Bayesian analysis provided evidence in favor of the null hypothesis of no difference. These findings indicate constraints on the generalizability of the face-name matching effect and suggest that its emergence depends on the heterogeneity of the stimulus materials.