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Updated: Jul 20, 2026
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Eye Movement Monitoring of Memory
Published on: August 15, 2010
Age differences in accuracy and choosing in eyewitness identification and face recognition
J H Searcy1, J C Bartlett, A Memon
1School of Human Development, University of Texas at Dallas 75083-0688, USA. searcy@utdallas.edu
Memory & Cognition
|June 4, 1999
Summary
Senior adults exhibit increased false recognitions in eyewitness lineups and face recognition tasks, a phenomenon known as the false alarm effect, impacting memory accuracy with age.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Neuroscience of Aging
- Human Face Recognition
Background:
- Aging is associated with increased false recognition of new faces.
- The 'false alarm effect' in face recognition has implications for eyewitness identification.
- Understanding age-related changes in memory is crucial for legal and social contexts.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the generalization of the false alarm effect in aging adults to eyewitness identification tasks.
- To compare face recognition accuracy and error patterns between young and senior adults.
- To determine if age-related deficits in face recognition extend to conjunction faces.
Main Methods:
- Young and senior adults participated in eyewitness identification tasks with target-present and target-absent lineups.
- Participants completed an old/new face recognition task including novel faces and conjunctions of studied faces.
- Perceptual processing abilities were assessed to control for sensory deficits.
Main Results:
- Senior adults demonstrated lower accuracy and higher false alarm rates in lineup identifications compared to young adults.
- Seniors falsely recognized more new faces in the recognition task.
- After controlling for perceptual deficits, age differences in false recognition of conjunctions and discrimination of old from conjunction faces disappeared.
Conclusions:
- The false alarm effect observed in face recognition extends to eyewitness lineup identification in older adults.
- Age-related deficits in recollection of contextual information, not perceptual integration, likely underlie these findings.
- Familiarity-based recognition processes appear relatively preserved in aging individuals.
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