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Holistic Facial Composite Creation and Subsequent Video Line-up Eyewitness Identification Paradigm
Published on: December 24, 2015
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High confidence in falsely recognizing prototypical faces
Cristina Sampaio1, Victoria Reinke1, Jeffrey Mathews1
1Department of Psychology, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA, USA.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (2006)
|May 12, 2017
Summary
People are often confident when misidentifying faces, especially prototypes. Confidence and accuracy in face recognition depend on the item type, impacting eyewitness lineups.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive psychology
- Forensic psychology
- Psychology
Background:
- Metacognition plays a crucial role in assessing the accuracy of memory.
- Face recognition is a complex cognitive process susceptible to various biases.
- Understanding confidence-accuracy relationships is vital for legal applications, such as eyewitness identification.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate metacognitive confidence in the recognition of prototypical faces.
- To examine how confidence judgments relate to accuracy in a face recognition task.
- To explore the implications of these findings for eyewitness identification procedures.
Main Methods:
- Participants viewed digitally constructed faces, varying in their deviation from prototypes.
- Two experiments were conducted: a simple recognition task and a multiple-choice task.
- Confidence ratings were collected alongside accuracy data for old items, new items, and new prototypes.
Main Results:
- Participants exhibited a high rate of confident false alarms to novel prototypes.
- A positive correlation between confidence and accuracy was observed for standard items.
- A negative correlation between confidence and accuracy was found for prototypical items.
Conclusions:
- The relationship between confidence and accuracy in face recognition is item-dependent.
- High confidence in recognizing prototypes does not necessarily equate to high accuracy.
- Findings suggest caution when using match-to-suspect strategies in eyewitness lineups due to potential for confident misidentifications.
Keywords:
Metacognitive approach to confidenceconfidenceconfidence–accuracyidentificationmatch-to-suspect lineupprototype effectMore Related Videos
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