Abstract
The circadian rhythm regulates arousal and activity levels throughout the day and determines hours of optimal cognitive performance. Thus far, circadian fluctuations in face recognition performance received little attention in the research literature. The current experiment investigated the effects of time-of-day optimality on the ability to recognize faces and discriminate between the contexts in which where they were encountered. Morning- and evening-type participants (N = 91) encoded faces in a crime-related and a neutral context, either at their optimal or non-optimal time of day. Contrary to our hypotheses, neither face recognition nor source monitoring performance benefited from testing at optimal time of day. We discuss peculiarities of face processing that could account for the discrepancy of our findings with word recall and recognition literature.
Highlights
The circadian rhythm regulates arousal and activity levels throughout the day and determines hours of optimal cognitive performance
Attributing familiarity to the incorrect source can lead to misidentifications and wrongful convictions (Lindsay, 2007), emphasizing the importance of studying factors that increase the risk of such memory errors
We investigated whether time-of-day optimality impairs face recognition and source monitoring performance
Summary
The circadian rhythm regulates arousal and activity levels throughout the day and determines hours of optimal cognitive performance. Time of day could be one such factor: Due to the functioning of our body clock, certain hours of the day are associated with the decline in cognitive performance, making us prone to memory errors (Schmidt et al, 2007) This observation motivated us to investigate whether testing at non-optimal time of day could be among the risk factors for errors in source memory for faces. The so-called morning types perform best early in the day, whereas evening types peak in their performance in the evening hours (Goldstein et al, 2007; Levandovski et al, 2013) This pattern is known as the synchrony effect: Performance varies as a function of synchrony, or alignment of the time when a certain task is performed with the ongoing circadian phase (e.g., May, 1999; May & Hasher, 1998; Nowack & Van Der Meer, 2018). We made the first attempt to investigate the synchrony effect in the traditional face recognition paradigm
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
