Summary
“When viewing unfamiliar faces, photos of the same person often are perceived asbelonging to different people and photos of different people as belonging to the sameperson. Identity matching of unfamiliar faces is especially challenging when the photosare of a person whose ethnicity differs from that of the observer. In contrast, matching istrivial when viewing familiar faces, regardless of race. In a 1-in-30-lineup task in whichparticipants are asked to find the image of a target from an array of 30 identities, viewing multiple images of an own-race target improves performance, reflecting rapidfamiliarization (Dowsett et al., 2016). Here, participants were asked to find an other-racetarget from an array of 30 images, and participants’ performance on this task wasobserved as they were provided with additional images of each other-race target. I report rapid familiarization when the target was known to be present (Experiment 1) but not when both target-present and target-absent trials were included in the task (Experiment 2). Viewing multiple images of a target-absent identity provided no benefit in reducing false alarms. Although a possible route to familiarization with other-race faces, my findings suggest caution for the use of multiple images in applied face verification settings.”--Page ii.
"The impact of such errors is clearly evident in eyewitness identification, in whichthe suspect’s appearance can vary significantly from the witness’s memory. TheInnocence Project is an organization formed to help exonerate individuals wrongfullyconvicted of crimes. Misidentification errors (i.e., identifying someone from the lineupwho was not the perpetrator) contributed to the false incarceration of about 75% of over300 people exonerated so far by The Innocence Project (Innocence Project, 2016).Therefore, it is imperative that we understand the process by which a face goes frombeing unfamiliar to familiar in order to inform protocols to facilitate accurate recognitionof unfamiliar faces."--Page 12.