Face Matching Under Time Pressure and Task Demands

Understanding how people recognize and match faces is important in many real-world situations, including policing, military, security and retail environments. We investigate the effects of time pressure and addi-tional task demands on face matching performance. In a 2x2 factorial design—varying whether there was high or low time pressure, and whether or not an ad-ditional task had to be completed—participants were asked to judge whether each of a series of face image pairs were of the same person. Large individual differ-ences were observed. Recall was higher than precision, and performance worsened under high time pressure with the additional task. Learning effects within con-ditions were observed, and response times were gener-ally independent of the decisions made. Some impli-cations of these findings for applied environments are discussed