PERCEIVED FACIAL ATTRACTIVENESS AND DISTINCTIVENESS AFFECT FACE RECOGNITION

We investigated the influence of perceived impression on the recognition of strangers' faces. Two experiments were conducted to examine whether face recognition distortion varies depending on perceived attractiveness and distinctiveness. Participants judged the attractiveness or distinctiveness of a target face presented in a video. Subsequently, they were shown a set of five images in which attractiveness or distinctiveness were manipulated and asked to select the original target face from the five images. Results showed that when participants initially judged a target face to be highly attractive, the more attractive image in the set was recognised as the target face than when participants judged the target face to be low in attractiveness. Furthermore, when participants judged a target face to be highly distinct, the more distinctive image in the set was recognised as the target face than when participants judged a target face to be low in distinctiveness. These findings were discussed in terms of the labelling effect and the verbal overshadowing effect.