Eyewitness Identification: Effect of Disguises and Appearance Changes

Remembering Faces

How do we remember a face? Do we remember the features of a face or do we remember the whole face as a gestalt? Some debate has occurred over this issue, with a number of questions remaining unanswered. It may be that both types of encoding occur or that one strategy is more relied on depending on the developmental stage of the observer. For example, it has been suggested that adolescents and adults are more likely to use a gestalt or holistic approach to remembering faces, taking the whole face in, whereas younger children may be more likely to rely on a featural strategy, focusing on individual features.

Change of Appearance: Facial Characteristics

Regardless of the process that we use to remember a face, it becomes much more difficult to do this when facial characteristics change. Moreover, a change in one feature may make the whole face appear different. Consider the case when someone changes hairstyles or hair color or if a male shaves off his beard or grows facial hair. Changes in any of these features make it more difficult to correctly recognize that person.

The influence of three facial changes on recognition/identification accuracy has been examined across a number of studies: changes in hairstyle, facial hair, and the addition or removal of glasses. To study the influence of these changes, often participants are presented with several photographs featuring different “targets.” Following some delay, participants are presented with another set of photographs, some of which are never-before-seen faces, some are of the targets as they appeared in the initial set of photographs, and others are of the targets but with some changes in appearance—for example, the target may not be wearing glasses in the first set of photos but could be wearing glasses in the new set. When an alteration or change is made, there is a significant decrease in accurate identification. Moreover, when changes to facial features are combined, the difficulty with identification can increase. Most often, changes to facial features results in an inability to correctly recognize the person seen previously.

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