Developmental improvement and age-related decline in unfamiliar face matching

Age-related changes have been documented widely in studies of face recognition and eyewitness identification. However, it is not clear whether these changes arise from general developmental differences in memory or occur specifically during the perceptual processing of faces. We report two experiments to track such perceptual changes using a 1-in-10 (Experiment 1) and 1-in-1 (Experiment 2) matching task for unfamiliar faces. Both experiments showed improvements in face matching during childhood and adult-like accuracy levels by adolescence. In addition, face-matching performance declined in adults of the age of 65. These findings indicate that developmental improvements and aging-related differences in face processing arise from changes in the perceptual encoding of faces. A clear face inversion effect was also present in all age groups. This indicates that those age-related changes in face matching reflect a quantitative effect, whereby typical face processes are engaged but do not operate at the best-possible level. These data suggest that part of the problem of eyewitness identification in children and elderly persons might reflect impairments in the perceptual processing of unfamiliar faces

Processing unfamiliar faces

It is well established that matching unfamiliar faces is highly error prone, even under seemingly optimal conditions.  This thesis shows large individual differences in unfamiliar face matching.  Across several visual cognition tasks, the best predictor for this variability was recognition of inverted faces, regardless of whether they were familiar or unfamiliar.  In stark contrast, there was no relationship between upright familiar and unfamiliar face processing.  Moreover, the ability to match faces was unrelated to the ability to reject these faces, unless they were upright familiars.  Therefore, the processes involved in upright unfamiliar face processing appeared to be qualitatively similar to those underlying the recognition of inverted familiar and unfamiliar faces, but very different to those responsible for upright familiar face processing.  Finally, the presence of a second face severely impaired matching a target person, particularly when they were presented close together.  The implications of these findings for the forensic field are discussed

Matching face images taken on the same day or months apart : The limitations of photo ID

Summary: It is well-established that matching images of unfamiliar faces is rather error prone. However, there is an important mismatch between face matching in laboratory and realistic settings. All of the currently available face-matching databases were designed to establish the baseline level of unfamiliar face perception. Therefore, target and test images for each face identity have been taken on the same day, minimizing within-face variations. In realistic settings, on the other hand, faces do vary, even day to day. This study examined the proficiency of matching images of unfamiliar faces, which were taken on the same day or months apart. In two experiments, same-day images were matched substantially more accurately and faster than different-date photographs using the standard 1-in-10 and pairwise face-matching tasks. This suggests that experimental studies on face matching underestimate its difficulty in real-world situations. Photographs of unfamiliar faces seem to be unreliable proofs of identity, especially if the ID documents do not use very recent images of the holders

Matching face images taken on the same day or months apart : the limitations of photo ID

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Changes in the own group bias across immediate and delayed recognition tasks

Face recognition is biased in favour of in-group identity, particularly strongly for race or ethnicity but to some extent also for sex and age. This ‘own group bias’ (OGB) can have profound implications in practical settings, with incorrect identification of black suspects by white witnesses constituting 40% of criminal exonerations investigated by the Innocence Project. Although authors have offered several explanations for the OGB in face recognition, there is little consensus, apart from the acknowledgement that the bias must reflect perceptual learning history. One matter that is not currently clear is whether the bias occurs at encoding, or at retrieval from memory. We report an experiment designed to tease out bias at encoding, versus bias at retrieval. Black and white South African participants encoded 16 target faces of both the same and other race and gender, and attempted immediately afterward to match the target faces to members of photograph arrays that either contained or did not contain the targets. After a further delay, they attempted to identify the faces they had encoded from memory. Results showed a strong crossover OGB in the delayed matching task, but an asymmetrical OGB at retrieval (only white participants showed the OGB). Further investigation of recognition performance, considering only images correctly matched in the delayed matching task, showed a narrowly non-significant OGB at retrieval, but the investigation was likely not sufficiently powered to discover the effect, if it exists. Significance: • We demonstrate the presence of a crossover OGB in face recognition in a sample of black and white South Africans in a delayed matching task (a measure of encoding). • Our findings show that the OGB may change rapidly. In the present study, the OGB took a crossover form at retrieval immediately after encoding, but was asymmetrical when assessed shortly afterwards. • We used a novel approach for disentangling effects at encoding and at retrieval, but do not provide clear evidence to distinguish whether the OGB is a failure of encoding or of memory retrieval

Self-reported psychopathy in the Middle East: a cross-national comparison across Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United States

Background: The construct of psychopathy is sparsely researched in the non-Western world, particularly in the Middle East. As such, the extent to which the psychopathy construct can be generalized to other cultures, including Middle Eastern Arab cultures, is largely unknown. Methods: The present study investigated the cross-cultural/national comparability of self-reported psychopathy in the United States (N = 786), Egypt (N = 296), and Saudi Arabia (N = 341). Results: A widely used psychopathy questionnaire demonstrated largely similar properties across the American and Middle Eastern samples and associations between Five Factor Model (FFM) personality and psychopathy were broadly consistent. Nevertheless, several notable cross-cultural differences emerged, particularly with regard to the internal consistencies of psychopathy dimensions and the correlates of Coldheartedness. Additionally, in contrast to most findings in Western cultures, associations between psychopathy and FFM personality varied consistently by gender in the Egyptian sample. Conclusions: These findings lend preliminary support to the construct validity of self-reported psychopathy in Arabic-speaking cultures, providing provisional evidence for the cross-cultural generalizability of certain core characteristics of psychopathy

Depression following major life transitions in women: a review and theory

Depression can occur due to common major life transitions, such as giving birth, menopause, retirement, empty-nest transition, and midlife crisis. Although some of these transitions are perceived as positive (e.g., giving birth), they may still lead to depression. We conducted a systematic literature review of the factors underlying the occurrence of depression following major life transition in some individuals. This review shows that major common life transitions can cause depression if they are sudden, major, and lead to loss (or change) of life roles (e.g., no longer doing motherly or fatherly chores after children leave family home). Accordingly, we provide a theoretical framework that explains depression caused by transitions in women. One of the most potential therapeutic methods of ameliorating depression associated with life transitions is either helping individuals accept their new roles (e.g., accepting new role as a mother to ameliorate postpartum depression symptoms) or providing them with novel life roles (e.g., volunteering after retirement or children leave family home) may help them overcome their illness

Feature instructions improve face-matching accuracy

Identity comparisons of photographs of unfamiliar faces are prone to error but important for applied settings, such as person identification at passport control. Finding techniques to improve face-matching accuracy is therefore an important contemporary research topic. This study investigated whether matching accuracy can be improved by instruction to attend to specific facial features. Experiment 1 showed that instruction to attend to the eyebrows enhanced matching accuracy for optimized same-day same-race face pairs but not for other-race faces. By contrast, accuracy was unaffected by instruction to attend to the eyes, and declined with instruction to attend to ears. Experiment 2 replicated the eyebrow-instruc- tion improvement with a different set of same-race faces, comprising both optimized same- day and more challenging different-day face pairs. These findings suggest that instruction to attend to specific features can enhance face-matching accuracy, but feature selection is cru- cial and generalization across face sets may be limited

Criminal thinking in a Middle Eastern prison sample of thieves, drug dealers and murderers.

Purpose: The Psychological Inventory of Criminal Thinking Styles (PICTS) has been applied extensively to the study of criminal behaviour and cognition. This study aimed to explore the psychometric characteristics (factorial structure, reliability and external validity) of an Arabic version of the PICTS, to explore cross-cultural differences between a sample of Middle-Eastern (Egyptian) prisoners and Western prison samples, and to examine the influence of type of crime on criminal thinking styles. Method: A group of 130 Egyptian male prisoners who had been sentenced for theft, drug dealing or murder completed the PICTS. Their scores were compared with the reported data of American, British, and Dutch prisoners. Results: The Arabic PICTS showed scale reliabilities estimated by coefficient alpha comparable to the English version, and reliabilities estimated as test-retest correlations were high. Confirmatory factor analysis showed that the PICTS subscale scores of Egyptian prisoners best fitted a two-factor model, in which one dimension comprised mollification, entitlement, superoptimism, sentimentality and discontinuity, and the second dimension reflected the thinking styles of power orientation, cut-off and cognitive indolence. Observed levels of thinking styles varied by type of crime, specifically between prisoners sentenced for theft, drug dealing, and murder. Cultural differences in criminal thinking styles were also found, whereby the Egyptian prisoners recorded the highest scores in most thinking styles, while American, Dutch and English prisoners were more comparable to each other. Conclusions: This study provides one of the first investigations of criminal thinking styles in a non-Western sample and suggests that cross-cultural differences in the structure of these thinking styles exist. In addition, the results indicate that criminal thinking styles need to be understood by the type of crime for which a person has been sentenced

Left face matching bias: right hemisphere dominance or scanning habits?

A large body of work report a leftward bias in face processing. However, it is not clear whether this leftward bias purely reflects the dominance of the right hemisphere or is influenced by scanning habits developed by reading directions. Here, we report two experiments examining how well native readers of right to left Arabic scripts (Egyptians) could match (for identity) a target face that appeared with a companion to a line-up of 10 faces. There was a significant advantage for matching faces that appeared on the left. However, Experiment 2 found that the magnitude of this left face matching bias was almost three times weaker than the magnitude of the leftward bias shown by native readers of left to right English scripts (British). Accordingly, we suggest that the right hemisphere dominance for face processing underlies the leftward face perception bias, but with the interaction of scanning habits