Face Identification Accuracy and Response Latency

What is it about?

The aim of this project was to examine the relationship between the accuracy in the identification of persons and the response time, by means of two experiments. In the experiment 1 the subjects were presented a photographic image of an unknown person and then they were asked to perform a distracting task. Subsequently they tried to identify the target person in a new photography placed among a set of five images of persons of a similar appearance. The results showed that there is a large variability in the response time between correct identifications and false alarms. In the experiment 2 the subjects were asked to identify the target person in a forced choice assignment. In this test significant differences in the response time were found in relation to the right answer. The subjects that gave correct responses took less time in answering than the subjects that gave false alarms by choosing one of the foils in the lineup. In most cases the response time was higher than the 10-12 sec proposed by Dunning and Perretta (2002) as the time limit needed to predict the correct identifications.

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Why is it important?

The results will be examined considering the possible implications regarding the evaluation of the eyewitnesses accuracy in the suspects´recognition assignments.