Tracking the truth: the effect of face familiarity on eye fixations during deception

ABSTRACT

In forensic investigations, suspects sometimes conceal recognition of a familiar person to protect co-conspirators or hide knowledge of a victim. The current experiment sought to determine whether eye fixations could be used to identify memory of known persons when lying about recognition of faces. Participants’ eye movements were monitored whilst they lied and told the truth about recognition of faces that varied in familiarity (newly learned, famous celebrities, personally known). Memory detection by eye movements during recognition of personally familiar and famous celebrity faces was negligibly affected by lying, thereby demonstrating that detection of memory during lies is influenced by the prior learning of the face. By contrast, eye movements did not reveal lies robustly for newly learned faces. These findings support the use of eye movements as markers of memory during concealed recognition but also suggest caution when familiarity is only a consequence of one brief exposure.

KEYWORDS:

• Eye fixations
• Deception
• Face recognition
• Familiarity strength
• Memory detection
• Photographic evidence

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Acknowledgements

Faces were resourced from unfamiliar face databases at Glasgow University (GUFD; Burton et al., 2010); the Psychological Image Collection at Stirling (PICS, n.d.; http://pics.psych.stir.ac.uk), and the MIT-CBCL Face Recognition Database (2014; http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/cbcl). Thanks also to staff and students from Taunton College, Southampton, and the University of Stirling, who volunteered to have their photographs taken to create an extended database for the present experiment. Additional thanks to Paul Marshman for technical support with eye tracking and programming. Final thanks to Kiran Acharya and Juan David Leongómez for assistance with photo editing and figure production. This research, conducted as part of the first author’s doctorate, was funded by a studentship awarded by the Department of Psychology, University of Portsmouth.