ABSTRACT
In Chapter 2, we recounted the wrongful conviction of Laszlo Virag because of the testimony of several mistaken witnesses – and this was not an isolated case. Much of the recent research interest in the processes of human face recognition was stimulated by some of these high-profile cases of mistaken identity in criminal investigations. In Chapter 2, we also described experiments which showed how error prone performance at matching faces can be, even when there is no memory load at all, an observation with important implications for security settings in which identities are checked using photo identification. In this chapter, we focus on these applied areas where face recognition difficulties may be found and consider how psychological research may help us to design better systems for the future. We end by describing recent advances in understanding individual differences in performance on these tasks.
