How choice blindness can help us understand face recognition

How people recognise unfamiliar faces has puzzled cognitive psychologists for decades. Ample evidence suggests that effective face recognition requires good perceptual and memory skills. One needs to be capable of extracting information about facial identity and recall this information when required to recognize a face. However, choice blindness, the phenomenon that describes the inability to detect surreptitious changes in the outcome of one’s decisions, calls the view that perception and memory alone are sufficient for successful recognition of unfamiliar faces into question. As this chapter will demonstrate, eyewitnesses often fail to notice changes in the outcome of their face recognition and identification decisions, albeit having sufficient memory resources. Drawing from the choice blindness literature, we conclude that metacognition is a contributing factor in unfamiliar face recognition.