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Study design

Across two experiments involving 275 participants, researchers tested recognition of low-resolution naturalistic faces. Faces were shown unmasked or masked during learning and test, creating matched and mismatched conditions. This design examined whether seeing the same facial context at learning and retrieval helps recognition.

Findings

Accuracy remained below 60%. When a target was learned with the full face visible, matching context did not reliably change recognition. When a masked target was learned, matched masked conditions improved recognition in Experiment 1, but the benefit did not repeat in Experiment 2. Confidence and decision time were also imperfect guides to accuracy.

Limits and context

The results vary between two experiments and overall accuracy was modest under the deliberately difficult image conditions. The task does not establish how recognition works in real investigations or show that a particular practice improves identification accuracy in the field.

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