Being observed detrimentally affects face perception.

Abstract

In Experiment 1, simulated social pressure was manipulated through two factors: whether participants believed they were interacting with others or not via a webcam and whether they believed they were being recorded or not. Participants who believed they were being recorded, were significantly less accurate at recognising faces than those who did not believe they were being recorded. For Experiment 2, we found that the recognition of own-ethnicity faces was negatively affected by observation but not the recognition of other-ethnicity faces, and then only when observed during learning. Experiment 3 demonstrated that observation affected the recognition of upright faces more so than that of objects and inverted faces. Experiment 4 showed that observation does not affect the amount of holistic processing engaged in, but does affect how people view faces. Such results indicate that expert face recognition is susceptible to increased error if participants are being observed whilst encoding faces.