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. 2015 Aug 18:3:e1184.
doi: 10.7717/peerj.1184. eCollection 2015.

Face matching in a long task: enforced rest and desk-switching cannot maintain identification accuracy

Hamood M Alenezi  1 , Markus Bindemann  2 , Matthew C Fysh  2 , Robert A Johnston  2
Affiliations

Face matching in a long task: enforced rest and desk-switching cannot maintain identification accuracy

Hamood M Alenezi et al. PeerJ. .

Abstract

In face matching, observers have to decide whether two photographs depict the same person or different people. This task is not only remarkably difficult but accuracy declines further during prolonged testing. The current study investigated whether this decline in long tasks can be eliminated with regular rest-breaks (Experiment 1) or room-switching (Experiment 2). Both experiments replicated the accuracy decline for long face-matching tasks and showed that this could not be eliminated with rest or room-switching. These findings suggest that person identification in applied settings, such as passport control, might be particularly error-prone due to the long and repetitive nature of the task. The experiments also show that it is difficult to counteract these problems.

Keywords: Face matching; Face perception; Passport control; Unfamiliar faces.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare there are no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Face matching performance in a long task (taken from Alenezi & Bindemann, 2013).
Open symbols denote match trials, grey-filled symbols denote mismatch trials. The data is split into 25 blocks of 40 trials, with each block comprising 20 match and 20 mismatch face pairs.
Figure 2
Figure 2. Face-matching performance for Experiment 1.
The data is split into 25 blocks, illustrated on the horizontal axis. Individual graphs show percentage accuracy, response times, d-prime and criterion. Open symbols denote match trials and grey-filled symbols denote mismatch trials. Line breaks between blocks indicate enforced rest periods.
Figure 3
Figure 3. Face-matching performance for Experiment 2.
The data is split into 25 blocks, illustrated on the horizontal axis. Individual graphs show percentage accuracy, response times, d-prime and criterion. Open symbols denote match trials and grey-filled symbols denote mismatch trials. Dotted lines between blocks indicate room switches.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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