<P> The Face Advantage allows information and memories to be recalled easier through the presentation of a person's face rather than a person's voice . Faces and voices are very similar stimuli that reveal similar information and result in similar processes of memory recall . During face perception, there are three stages of memory recall that include recognition, followed by the remembering of semantic memory and episodic memory, and finally name recall . The Face Advantage is shown through an experiment where participants are presented with faces and voices of unfamiliar faces and recognizable celebrity faces . The stimuli are presented with a between - group design . The participants are asked to say if the face or voice is familiar . If the answer is yes, they are asked to recall semantic and episodic memories and finally the name of the face or voice . It was much easier for those presented with a celebrity's face to recall information than for those presented with a voice . The results show that in the second stage of face perception when memories are recalled, information is recalled faster and more accurate after a face is perceived, and slower, less accurate and with less detail after a voice is perceived . A possible explanation is that the connections between face representations and semantic and episodic memory are stronger than that of voices . </P> <P> Memory phenomena are rich sources of storylines and novel situations in popular media . Two phenomena that appear regularly are total recall abilities and amnesia . </P> <P> The Argentinean author, Jorge Luis Borges wrote the short story Funes the Memorious in 1944 . It depicts the life of Ireneo Funes, a fictional character who falls off his horse and experiences a head injury . After this accident, Funes has total recall abilities . He is said to recall an entire day with no mistakes, but this feat of recall takes him an entire day to accomplish . It is said that Borges was ahead of his time in his description of memory processes in this story, as it was not until the 1950s and research on the patient HM that some of what the author describes began to be understood . A more recent instance of total recall in literature is found in is in Stieg Larsson's books The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, in which the lead character, Lisbeth Salander remembers anything she reads, indicating she has total recall ability . Another example is in Dan Brown's books The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons, in which the main character, Dr. Robert Langdon, a religious iconography and symbology professor at Harvard University, has almost total recall ability . In The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon, the main character, Christopher Boone, is a 15 - year - old autistic boy with total recall abilities . </P> <P> Total recall is also popular in television . It can be seen in Season 4 of the television show "Criminal Minds", in which the character Dr. Spencer Reid claims to have total recall ability . Agent Fox Mulder from the television show "The X-Files" has a photographic memory, a popular term for total recall . Also, the character of hospital resident Lexie Grey on the television show "Grey's Anatomy" has total recall ability . </P>

Blank is the retention of memory for some period of time