School of Psychology, University of Central Lancashire, Preston PR1 2HE, United Kingdom.
J Exp Psychol Appl. 2012 Jun;18(2):224-38. doi: 10.1037/a0027393. Epub 2012 Apr 30.
Recognition memory for unfamiliar faces is facilitated when contextual cues (e.g., head pose, background environment, hair and clothing) are consistent between study and test. By contrast, inconsistencies in external features, especially hair, promote errors in unfamiliar face-matching tasks. For the construction of facial composites, as carried out by witnesses and victims of crime, the role of external features (hair, ears, and neck) is less clear, although research does suggest their involvement. Here, over three experiments, we investigate the impact of external features for recovering facial memories using a modern, recognition-based composite system, EvoFIT. Participant-constructors inspected an unfamiliar target face and, one day later, repeatedly selected items from arrays of whole faces, with "breeding," to "evolve" a composite with EvoFIT; further participants (evaluators) named the resulting composites. In Experiment 1, the important internal-features (eyes, brows, nose, and mouth) were constructed more identifiably when the visual presence of external features was decreased by Gaussian blur during construction: higher blur yielded more identifiable internal-features. In Experiment 2, increasing the visible extent of external features (to match the target's) in the presented face-arrays also improved internal-features quality, although less so than when external features were masked throughout construction. Experiment 3 demonstrated that masking external-features promoted substantially more identifiable images than using the previous method of blurring external-features. Overall, the research indicates that external features are a distractive rather than a beneficial cue for face construction; the results also provide a much better method to construct composites, one that should dramatically increase identification of offenders.
当研究和测试中的上下文线索（例如，头部姿势、背景环境、头发和服装）一致时，识别不熟悉的面孔的记忆会得到促进。相比之下，外部特征（尤其是头发）的不一致会导致不熟悉的面孔匹配任务出错。对于证人或犯罪受害者制作面部合成图像，外部特征（头发、耳朵和脖子）的作用不太明确，但研究确实表明它们会参与其中。在这里，我们通过三个实验，使用现代基于识别的合成系统 EvoFIT，研究了外部特征对面部记忆恢复的影响。参与者构建者检查了一个不熟悉的目标面孔，一天后，他们从整个面孔的数组中反复选择项目，使用“繁殖”功能让 EvoFIT 进化出一个合成图像；进一步的参与者（评估者）则对生成的合成图像进行命名。在实验 1 中，当构建过程中外部特征的视觉存在因高斯模糊而减少时，重要的内部特征（眼睛、眉毛、鼻子和嘴巴）会更加可识别：模糊度越高，内部特征的可识别度越高。在实验 2 中，增加外部特征的可见程度（与目标的匹配）也会提高内部特征的质量，尽管不如在整个构建过程中遮蔽外部特征的效果好。实验 3 表明，遮蔽外部特征比使用之前模糊外部特征的方法能促进更可识别的图像。总的来说，这项研究表明，外部特征是一种干扰而不是有益的线索，用于面部构建；研究结果还提供了一种更好的构建合成图像的方法，应该会大大提高对罪犯的识别能力。
