Face matching in a long task: Enforced rest breaks and desk-switching cannot maintain identification accuracy

Alenezi, Hamood and Bindemann, Markus and Fysh, Matthew C. and Johnston, Robert A. (2015) Face matching in a long task: Enforced rest breaks and desk-switching cannot maintain identification accuracy. PeerJ, . 3:e1184. ISSN 2167-8359. (doi:https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.1184) (Full text available)

Abstract

In face matching, observers have to decide whether two photographs depict the same person or different people. This task is not only remarkably difficult but accuracy declines further during prolonged testing. The current study investigated whether this decline in long tasks can be eliminated with regular rest-breaks (Experiment 1) or room-switching (Experiment 2). Both experiments replicated the accuracy decline for long face-matching tasks and showed that this could not be eliminated with rest or room-switching. These findings suggest that person identification in applied settings, such as passport control, might be particularly error-prone due to the long and repetitive nature of the task. The experiments also show that it is difficult to counteract these problems.

Item Type:	Article
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
Divisions:	Faculties > Social Sciences > School of Psychology > Cognitive Psychology
Depositing User:	Markus Bindemann
Date Deposited:	11 Dec 2015 10:51 UTC
Last Modified:	14 Dec 2015 14:36 UTC
Resource URI:	https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/53147 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)