Physiological Stress and Face Recognition: Differential Effects of Stress on Accuracy and the Confidence–Accuracy Relationship

Abstract

When eyewitnesses see a crime, they often do so under physiological stress. Research suggests that stress disrupts memory accuracy, but less is known about whether stress impacts the relationship between confidence and accuracy. Whereas researchers generally agree that pristine encoding and retrieval conditions lead to a strong relationship between the two ( Wixted & Wells, 2017 ), how violations of pristine conditions affect the relationship is unclear. In two experiments, participants encoded faces either under physiological stress (via a cold pressor task) or under control conditions. Participants were later given a recognition memory test for the faces and provided confidence judgments in their old/new decisions. As expected, stress impaired face recognition accuracy. However, we observed similar confidence–accuracy relationships regardless of stress condition. Though participants in the stress condition were less accurate in their identifications overall, they had the metacognitive awareness to scale back their confidence judgments.