Faces we don't forget

An example of why eye witness identification of criminal subjects is so prone to error.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-02/fj-fwd020414.php

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 4-Feb-2014
Contact: Ute Schoenfelder
Friedrich-Schiller-Universitaet Jena
Faces we don't forget
Psychologists at the University of Jena, Germany, explain how attractiveness prevents the recognition of faces

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In his research, he mostly deals with the perception of faces. "On the one hand we find very symmetrical and rather average faces appealing," he explains. "On the other hand, people who are perceived as being particularly attractive stand out by additional traits, which distinguish them from the average." Apart from being attractive, features like big eyes or a distinctively shaped mouth ensure a high recognition value. "We tend to remember those faces well," according to Wiese.

But this isn't generally true for all attractive people – as Wiese and his colleagues, Carolin Altmann and Professor Dr. Stefan Schweinberger are showing in a new study. In the science magazine "Neuropsychologia" the psychologists write that attractive faces without particularly remarkable features leave much less distinctive impressions on the memory (DOI: 10.1016./j.neuropsychologia. 2013.12.023). "We could show that the test subjects were more likely to remember unattractive faces than attractive ones, when the latter didn't have any particularly noticeable traits," Holger Wiese says.

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Additionally the Jena psychologists' study revealed a further interesting secondary aspect: In the case of attractive faces, scientists detected considerably more false positive results. In other words: in the test phase the test persons stated that they recognized a face without having seen it before. "We obviously tend to believe that we recognize a face just because we find it attractive", Wiese supposes.