Running Head : UNFAMILIAR FACE MATCHING The Effects of External Features and Time Pressure on Unfamiliar Face Matching

Previous research has suggested that human performance on the task of matching previously unseen faces is often poor and varies widely from person to person. The external face features can strongly influence unfamiliar face matching but are potentially unreliable cues, and attention to internal face features may facilitate matching performance. Forty-three first year psychology students performed a face matching task where display time and external feature similarity were manipulated. Eye movements, response time, accuracy and confidence were measured. External feature changes affected decision bias, but not discrimination. Discrimination correlated positively with fixation time on internal facial features in the 2-second display time condition, but no relationship was found in the 6-second condition. Participants varied widely in the time spent fixating particular features, and generally fixated only a subset of features. People appear to vary in the face features used in a matching decision, and what they look does not appear to be a strong predictor of matching performance.