UC Riverside

Face recognition errors occur frequently, with consequences that range from personal embarrassment to eyewitness misidentification. Established interventions have taken a variety of approaches in attempts to improve face recognition, yet they have lacked in their capacity for practical use. With this in mind, I created an application-oriented training program in an effort to improve face recognition in real-world contexts. Specifically, I designed the training to teach individuals how to process faces holistically, or in terms of how facial features spatially relate to one another. After developing the training, I conducted three experiments to assess the general efficacy of the training, examine its capacity to improve recognition over time, and compare its impact against two established other-race face recognition interventions. Experiment samples consisted of 196 to 320 participants, whom I recruited through the UC Riverside Psychology subject pool and CloudResearch Connect. In all experiments, participants completed a baseline recognition memory task, followed by the training or an alternate condition (matched control in Experiments 1 and 2, individuation or cross-race effect awareness in Experiment 3), then completed another recognition memory task. In Experiment 2, participants completed two additional recognition memory tasks 24 hours and 1 week after the manipulation. Memory strength, operationalized as accuracy on the recognition memory task, was compared before versus after the manipulation to determine whether the training produced an improvement in recognition memory ability. Across the experiments, multilevel modeling revealed that the training did not lead to improved face recognition ability. Instead, training participants generally displayed poorer recognition memory ability after the manipulation compared to their average recognition ability at baseline. Slight fluctuations in recognition ability had returned to baseline levels after one week (Experiment 2), and only the previously established interventions – not the training – led to improved other-race face recognition (Experiment 3). The training may have incited depletion and fatigue among participants, which I seek to address in future research. In future work I will also measure the extent to which the training promotes holistic processing.