Familiarity, Target Set and False Positives in Face Recognition

Abstract

Distinctiveness of a face predicts both miss errors (MEs) and false positives (FPs) but correlations between these errors are low (e.g. Hancock, Burton, & Bruce, 1996). To investigate this, distinctiveness and personal familiarity were analysed as predictors of MEs and FPs in a face recognition experiment. Faces were assigned to three groups, which meant that each set were distractor faces for two different sets of targets. Mean ratings of distinctiveness predicted MEs, whereas familiarity predicted FPs only if individual ratings were used. The degree to which subjects were consistent in their ratings and performance over different faces was also considered. Good subject consistency was found on FPs when the subjects saw the same target faces. If subjects who had seen different target faces were compared, then the consistency of FPs was lower than the consistency of MEs. The results imply that distinctiveness predicts MEs as a general property of the population of faces, whereas familiarity predicts FPs according to the idiosyncrasies of subjects.