We evaluated the detailed, behavioral properties of face matching performance in two specialist groups: forensic facial examiners and super-recognizers. Both groups compare faces to determine identity with high accuracy and outperform the general population. Typically, facial examiners are highly trained; super-recognizers rely on natural ability.…

The manuscript describes an experimental investigation of a technique that might reduce memory conformity: the reinforced self-affirmation procedure (RSA). While previous studies have already demonstrated the RSA's effectiveness in reducing other memory distortions (e.g., the misinformation effect and interrogative suggestibility), this has not…

The accurate detection of children's truthful and dishonest reports is essential as children can serve as important providers of information. Research using automated facial coding and machine learning found that children who were asked to lie about an event were more likely to look surprised when hearing the first question during an interview…

In the area of security, human cognition remains essential for face recognition despite advancements in technology. Law enforcement agencies (LEAs) are interested in harnessing these abilities, as recognizing people is a fundamental aspect of their work. We conducted two studies to support integrating human face recognition skills into police…

People routinely use news outlets and social media platforms to keep up with recent events. While information from these common sources often aligns in the messages conveyed, news headlines and microblogs on social media also frequently provide contradictory messages. In this study, we examined how people recall and recognize tweets and news…

Trauma victims often come to remember experiencing more trauma than they initially reported. Our experiments are the first to investigate a plausible mechanism for this memory amplification, namely, that people incorporate new details contained in post-event information (PEI) into their event memory. In Experiment 1, participants viewed traumatic…

In several applied contexts (e.g., earwitness testimony), the accurate recognition of unfamiliar voices can be a critical part of the person identification process. However, recognising unfamiliar voices is prone to error. While such errors could be reduced by testing the proficiency of listeners, the established tests of unfamiliar voice matching…

Facial examiners make visual comparisons of face images to establish the identities of persons in police investigations. This study utilised eye-tracking and an individual differences approach to investigate whether these experts exhibit specialist viewing behaviours during identification, by comparing facial examiners with forensic fingerprint…

The response time-based concealed information test can reveal when a person recognizes a relevant item among other, irrelevant items, based on comparatively slower responding. Thereby, if a person is concealing the knowledge about the relevance of this item (e.g., recognizing it as a murder weapon), this deception can be revealed. A recent study,…

The paper presents the memory conformity effect phenomenon, which assumes that information about the same event that a witness acquires from another witness (misinformation) is incorporated into the first witness' memory of the event (original information). The study has two goals: (1) to verify the existence of people with the memory conformity…

Meditative mindfulness practices, promoting sustained attention and reducing mind-wandering, have been associated with improvements in cognitive abilities and memory. The present study explored whether a non-meditative practice could be successfully applied in a forensic application; specifically, whether mindfulness instructions can be embedded…

The current research conducted a three-level meta-analysis with a total of 159 journal articles on the other-race bias in facial identification, which had been published between 1969 and 2021. The effect size analysis yielded moderate pooled effect sizes of the other-race bias on face identification--people showed higher hit rates and…

Individual differences in face identification ability range from prosopagnosia to super-recognition. The current study examined whether face identification ability predicts voice identification ability (participants: N = 529). Superior-face-identifiers (exceptional at face memory and matching), superior-face-recognisers (exceptional at face memory…

Face matching is the act of deciding whether two facial images depict the same person or different people. The real-world face-matching task of checking photo IDs typically occurs under conditions of image-size disparity: A small picture is compared with a life-size face. We examined the effect of image-size disparity on face-matching accuracy. In…

This experiment was designed to examine how viewing conditions could affect witnesses' vulnerability to suggestive influence. It was predicted that when the encoding conditions were stronger, accurate witnesses would be less likely to shift their decisions when prompted to reexamine the lineup, and that confirming feedback would effectively…