Race, arousal, attention, exposure and delay: An examination of factors moderating face recognition.

Abstract

Otto H. MacLin, M. Kimberly MacLin, and Roy S. MalpassUniversity of Texas at El PasoA large percentage of people recently exonerated by DNA evidence were impris-oned on the basis of faulty eyewitness identification. Many of these cases involvedvictims and suspects of different races. Two studies examined the recognition ofHispanic and Black target faces by Hispanic participants under nonoptimal viewingconditions. When viewing time decreased, recognition performance for same- andother-race faces systematically shifted downward. Recognition accuracy for faces ofboth races decreased under conditions of high negative arousal and attention load;however, recognition of same-race faces was differentially affected by attentiondistractors. Face recognition accuracy was not affected by a delay between initialpresentation of the faces and the face recognition test. An understanding of howrecognition of other-race persons differs from that of same-race persons can assistby reducing misidentifications and ensuring that the perpetrator rather than aninnocent person is imprisoned.Eyewitness testimony often serves as direct evidence in a courtroom settingand can have a strong influence on juries (Loftus, 1974; Penrod & Cutler, 1995).Unfortunately, eyewitness identification is imperfect and can at times lead to theconviction of innocent people, as evidenced by a series of recent DNA exoner-ation cases. Breakthroughs in DNA testing have facilitated the isolation of factorsthat lead to false imprisonment. Of 62 cases examined, 52 involved mistakenidentifications (Connors, Lundregan, Miller, & McEwan, 1996; Scheck, Neufeld,& Dwyer, 2000). In 69% of the misidentification cases, the victim was White,whereas in 57% of those cases the exonerated defendant was Black, whichindicates that a proportionally greater number of misidentifications occurredacross racial lines.This finding may come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the phenom-enon commonly known as the own-race effect, cross-race effect, or own-race bias(Chance & Goldstein, 1996; Malpass & Kravitz, 1969; Brigham & Malpass,1985), which posits that people perform poorly when attempting to recognize aperson of a different race (Meissner & Brigham, 2001). A large body of literatureexists that examines factors affecting the recognition of own-race faces, such asdistinctiveness of the face, sex of the face, age of the witness, attention, arousal,exposure, and delay between observation and testing; however, only 18% of the