Face identification accuracy impaired by poor sleep

It is often necessary to identify unfamiliar people by comparing face images: for example a CCTV image to a mugshot, or a passport photograph to a traveller. ‌‌‌ Now researchers have shown, in a new study published in Royal Society Open Science, that the accuracy of these decisions is impaired by poor sleep. However the study also found that poor sleepers were just as confident in their decisions, highlighting possible implications for security and policing. The study, which was led by the University of New South Wales in collaboration with the University of Glasgow, set out to examine how sleep would affect the accuracy of facial identification. Participants were asked to decide whether two images, presented on a computer monitor at the same time, pictured the same person or two different people. The researchers set the task to differ from the face recognition tasks most of us encounter in our daily lives in two important ways: firstly, the people pictured in the images are unfamiliar. Secondly, the task did not involve memory, because the images appear on the screen at the same time.