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Updated: Aug 11, 2026

Holistic Facial Composite Creation and Subsequent Video Line-up Eyewitness Identification Paradigm
Published on: December 24, 2015
The accuracy of memory for faces of personally known individuals
Serge Brédart1, Christel Devue
1Department of Cognitive Science (B-32), University of Liège, Belgium. serge.bredart@ulg.ac.be
Abstract:
The present study was aimed at evaluating whether the very high accuracy of memory for familiar faces, demonstrated by Ge et al (2003, Perception 32 601-614) with a very familiar famous person, generalises to faces of personally known individuals. The accuracy of participants' perceptual memory for a close colleague's face and for their own face was evaluated by presenting original and manipulated pictures of these two targets. The manipulation consisted of increasing or decreasing the interocular distance. As in Ge et al's study, results indicated that proportions of correct recognition of the original faces, and just noticeable differences for the detection of alterations in the recognition task, were not significantly different from the corresponding measures in a perceptual discrimination task performed by a sample of participants who did not know the target persons at all. High accuracy of memory generalises to faces of personally known individuals.
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