Facial Recognition

Facial memory and recognition are common daily activities and important forensic evidence in a trial or an investigation. Some people have difficulty in social interaction because of having face blindness and sometimes a suspect can be determined by the witness’ facial recognition. However, the reliability of facial recognition is being questioned for years because memory is a recreation of given information. It raises an interesting question to ask what factors improve or affect the accuracy of facial recognition and memory.
In order to study how to improve facial recognition, it is very important to understand the underlying mechanism for false memory which is either remembering things that never happen before or remembering wrong information.
Nathan Weber and Neil Brewer investigated the effect of both the confidence scale and the type of judgment strategy used on confidence-accuracy calibration and the decision latency-accuracy relationship. They created two trial conditions: one condition was the single-face trial as absolute judgment where participants were shown one face at a time and were required to answer whether the face was in the preceding series of faces that they had memorized and the other condition was the pair-face trial as relative judgment where participants were shown two faces at the same time and were required to answer which face was in the preceding series of faces that they had memorized. After the recognition test, they would rate the confidence level for their answers and researchers provided two different scales in two conditions. Full-range confidence scale ranged from 0% to 100% with 10% increment and half-range confidence scale ranged from 50% with 10%
Kleider and Stephen D. Goldinger explored generation heuristic and resemblance heuristic as mental short cuts that participants used to make decisions in facial recognition (Kleider & Goldinger, 2006). They designed 12 experiments with two groups of photographs and required participants to complete “exclusion (source memory) task” after memorizing faces. The generation heuristic was used in face recognition based on whether or not details of the memorized faces can be retrieved and the resemblance heuristic was used when the face is highly associated with the prototype. They found that participants used generation heuristic for the group without distinctive features and used resemblance heuristic group groups with distinctive features. In some conditions, participants combined two heuristics to improve or damage facial recognition. Kleider and Goldinger also discussed the implication of this research in eyewitness memory about how to form a group of faces for recognition.
The overall purpose of our experiment is to study the effects of time and sources of faces on facial recognition. We measured four dependent variables for correctly recognizing right faces, correctly rejecting wrong faces, recognizing wrong faces as right and rejecting right faces as