Unconscious Transference and the Binding effect: common errors in face recognition and recall.

Incorrect associations between familiar and unfamiliar faces (Johnston & Edmonds, 2009) cause eyewitness identification mistakes. Witnesses identify familiar faces over targets (Davis et al., 2008) through Binding (Kersten et al., 2008) and Unconscious Transference (Wulff & Hyman, 2022). It remains unclear how different levels of face similarity affect recognition accuracy. Our study explores if when familiar and target faces are presented in different slides, participants choose familiar faces over correct ones. In Experiment 1 we presented six faces to familiarize, then six correct targets via incidental encoding. Next, participants identify targets in six simultaneous lineups. Lineups were randomly composed by familiar face, correct target, familiar face-correct target merged, two novel faces. In Experiment 2 and 3 we incorporate additional variables to this procedure, eyes open versus closed during retrieval, incidental versus intentional encoding. Data collection is ongoing. In Experiment 1 frequency of errors is higher than correct target choices (46.5% vs. 37.5%) and the most frequent is Unconscious Transference (29.5%). In addition, similarity between faces affects correct recognition. In Experiment 2 we expect closed eye recall increases correct identification, and in Experiment 3 obtain higher accuracy with intentional encoding. Which type of error will decrease remains an empirical question. Differently from previous studies, the novelty of this study is that the percentage of recognition errors due to familiarity is still very high also when the familiar face and the correct target are presented within the same experiment, suggesting that recognition errors may occur even in the absence of memory decay. The novelty of this study is that percentage of recognition errors due to familiarity remains very high when We demonstrate face familiarity significantly affects recognition accuracy in simultaneous lineups.