Abstract
AbstractIn forensic person recognition tasks, mistakes in the identification of unfamiliar faces occur frequently. This study explored whether these errors might arise because observers are poor at judging their ability to recognize unfamiliar faces, and also whether they might conflate the recognition of familiar and unfamiliar faces. Across two experiments, we found that observers could predict their ability to recognize famous but not unfamiliar faces. Moreover, observers seemed to partially conflate these abilities by adjusting ability judgements for famous faces after a test of unfamiliar face recognition (Experiment 1) and vice versa (Experiment 2). These findings suggest that observers have limited insight into their ability to identify unfamiliar faces. These experiments also show that judgements of recognition abilities are malleable and can generalize across different face categories.
Highlights
IntroductionEyewitnesses, for example, might observe an unknown perpetrator at a crime scene and may later attempt to identify this person in police investigations (Wells, Memon, & Penrod, 2006; Wells & Olsen, 2003)
The data shows that these ratings were close to ceiling for family faces (M = 6.53, SD = 0.75), and were higher for famous faces (M = 5.30, SD = 1.15) than unfamiliar faces that have been seen several times (M = 5.00, SD = 0.96) or only once (M = 4.03, SD = 1.18)
Ability judgements for family faces correlated with famous faces, r(58) = 0.322, p < 0.05, but not with unfamiliar-seen-once faces, r(58) = 0.191, p = 0.143, and unfamiliar-seen-several-times faces, r(58) = 0.166, p = 0.205
Summary
Eyewitnesses, for example, might observe an unknown perpetrator at a crime scene and may later attempt to identify this person in police investigations (Wells, Memon, & Penrod, 2006; Wells & Olsen, 2003). Security tasks such as passport control require the matching of a face photograph from an identity document to its bearer (Jenkins & Burton, 2008; Johnston & Bindemann, 2013). For example, correct identiications are typically made only on between 60 and ABOUT THE AUTHORS
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