Accounts of blending, distinctiveness, and typicality in the false recognition of faces.

The false recognition of distractor faces created from combinations of studied faces has been attributed to the creation of novel traces in memory, although familiarity accounts are also plausible. In 3 experiments, participants studied parent faces and then were tested with a distractor that was created by morphing 2 parents. These produced high false-alarm rates but no effects of a temporal separation manipulation. In a forced-choice version, participants chose the distractor over the parents. R. M. Nosofsky's (1986) Generalized Context Model and variants could account for some but not all aspects of the data. A new model, SimSample, can account for the effects of typicality and distinctiveness, but not for the morph false alarms unless explicit prototypes are included. The conclusions are consistent with an account of memory in which novel traces are created in memory; alternative explanations are also explored.