When a face is familiar to you—such as when the face is that of a family member or a celebrity—you can recognize it anywhere. However, achieving this level of familiarity is difficult, and changes in appearance from one encounter to the next can make recognition especially challenging. Even those whose job depends on identifying faces accurately, such as people working in policing and security, struggle with this task. However, a recent study by Rebekah L. Corpuz and Chris Oriet (2022)opens in new window demonstrated that observing changes in a face’s appearance may actually be important for learning to recognize that face in the long term. In their study, the researchers showed that viewing such changes over a period of just 1 minute led to more accurate recognition 5 days later.
Previous research suggests that viewing images that show variability in a face’s appearance can be beneficial to people who are learning to recognize a new face (see Ritchie & Burton, 2017). However, most of this research tests face recognition after only a short delay. The goal of Corpuz and Oriet’s (2022) study was to determine whether variability in a face’s appearance during training leads to better long-term memory of the newly encountered face.
The researchers trained participants to recognize an unfamiliar singer from another country. Some learned to recognize the singer from a single photograph. Others watched an interview with the singer that showed changes in camera angle, lighting, and pose in a constant setting. A third group watched one of the singer’s music videos, in which the singer’s hairstyle, makeup, clothing, and location changed several times. After 15 minutes, participants sorted a deck of cards that, unbeknownst to them, included new photos of the singer and four similar-looking people they had not yet seen. Their task was to sort the cards, making one pile of the singer’s photos and another of everyone else’s. They then returned 5 days later and repeated this task with a new deck of cards. Participants were also asked how confident they were that they would be able to recognize the singer.
When tested after 15 minutes, people were quite good at finding all the singer’s photos and rarely mistook similar-looking others for the singer. But the type of training they received mattered: Recognition was more accurate for people who saw the high-variability music video than for those who saw the low-variability interview or no-variability photo. Of greatest interest was the finding that the benefit of training with high variability held after a 5-day delay. That is, viewing 1 minute of video that depicted high variability in the singer’s appearance was sufficient to see a reduction in memory errors even when recognition was measured after 5 days. This finding hints that exposure to within-person variability may be critical in creating a permanent memory trace of what a person looks like. However, the researchers also found evidence that people are generally not aware of this phenomenon. Most participants expected that their memory would worsen over time, and those who trained with the high-variability video were actually less optimistic about the accuracy of their memory than were those who trained with a single photo.
This is the first study to demonstrate that training to recognize a face by using images with high variability in the appearance of the newly encountered face improves long-term memory of the face. This research could be helpful in improving policing and security, where errors in face recognition can have serious consequences. Specifically, it may be beneficial for developing strategies that can be used to train people to be better at recognizing faces.
This article is in the Basic/Experimental Psychology topic area. View more articles in the Basic/Experimental Psychology topic area.