ABSTRACT

The devastating effects of inaccurate face identification are many and varied, but were brought to public attention recently by a tragic inci­ dent of misidentification occurring in New York City. On February 4, 1999, law enforcement officials on the city’s streets gunned down an innocent individual bearing some facial similarity to a dangerous criminal. Although face identification ability and its failure have been studied extensively, we are far from understanding and predicting these kinds of misidentifications. This chapter focuses on processes thought to mediate face identification with the goal of exploring, within the source-monitoring framework, what these processes might involve. In the eyewitness literature, the expression “face identifica­ tion ability” may refer to memory for who was seen as well as memory for the way in which a person was seen. However, in this chapter, we use the term face identification to refer to source judgments (i.e., is the face exactly the same or different from how it was seen before) rather than old-new recognition judgments.