Reliability of face recognition performance

Abstract

A group of 112 college students studied different sets of 16 faces on three occasions 1 week apart. They were asked immediately after each study trial to pick those 16 faces from among 48 distractor faces. Performances were scored for hits, false alarm rates, and d′ and β. A moderate degree of consistency was shown in the intercorrelations among performance measures for each of the 3 days, although the values were limited by the distribution of performances among subjects. Analysis of individual subjects’ consistency over 3 days of the faces task shows that more than 50% of subjects perform consistently either above or below the means for performance of the total group. © 1979, Psychonomic Society, Inc.. All rights reserved.