CHANGING PHOTOS OF FACES - EFFECTS OF EXPOSURE DURATION AND PHOTO SIMILARITY ON RECOGNITION AND THE ACCURACY CONFIDENCE RELATIONSHIP

With high school students' photo pairs taken two years apart, it was demonstrated that the effects of exposure duration on face recognition depend upon the level of similarity between the viewing and test photographs. When similarity between the two photos of a face was high, the expected positive relationship between exposure time and recognition accuracy was obtained. However, when the two photographs were of low or medium similarity to each other, increased study time had either no effect, increased performance, or in some cases significantly reduced recognition performance. One implication of these data is that in some circumstances the gains in specific memory acquired through increased exposure time may serve to reduce rather than enhance recognition performance. Analyses of the relationship between subjects' accuracy and confidence judgments revealed that as both exposure duration and photo similarity increased, the magnitude of the accuracy-confidence correlation increased. Increasing the subjects' prospective awareness of the changes that may be made to the photos also increased the magnitude of the accuracy-confidence correlation but without corresponding increases in recognition performance. The implications of these results for the standard face-recognition paradigm in which the same photos are used for both study and test and the corresponding relevance of these results to real-world eyewitness situations where no two presentations of an individual are likely to be identical are discussed.