This is a facial memory test that shows how well you can remember faces. This test starts out by showing you a face and you have to guess from three faces which one was the original face. The test then starts to get harder and harder by showing you six faces for 20 seconds and you have to pick which face was in the lineup of six. It tn gets harder by putting colors into the faces so you cannot see the details very well.
I got a 76 percent on the test. It said that a normal person would be able to get around 80 percent. I think this is a good way of showing how difficult remembering faces can actually be.
http://www.faceblind.org/facetests/fgcfmt/fgcfmt_intro.php
Many police officers and detectives have cases where the only lead they have is a witness who has to identify someone they saw in the dark a block away wearing a hood or some impossible scenario like that. This face recognition is really cool, I received a 94% getting 68 out of 72 faces correct. This shows how difficult it really is, we always see on TV how the lineup is obvious and we could pick him out instantly but the witness has difficulty because they may go a few days without being reviewed over who or what they saw. This test is a good practice for those who want to improve their memory skills or at least get an idea of what it is to be a witness.
http://www.faceblind.org/facetests/fgcfmt/fgcfmt_intro.php
I received 78% on the activity.
I had never completed a similar exercise before now. I had always thought that I was one of those people with good facial recall, but that doesn't appear to be the case! I found it quite difficult when the coloring was changed for the pictures.
As difficult as I found the activity, I think that I would have an even more difficult time if I had been a victim or a bystander to a shocking crime. In that case, all of my attention wouldn't have been focused on memorizing faces as it was in this activity. With that idea, I'm impressed anyone can recall faces, especially given the low success rate on a focused activity.
I once saw a special Oprah did about facial recognition (she does something about everything, doesn't she?) and people witnessed a "crime" and were asked to identify the perp from a lineup. Only a very small percentage of the witnesses correctly identified the perp. Sometimes when we're in the comfort of our living room watching a crime show, I think we forget how traumatic and unpredictable a crime scene can actually be for a witness or victim.
I received 74% on the test
I thought it was rather difficult to identify the faces even before the color change. I think this is probably a pretty good estimation of the difficulty witnesses would have in identifying offenders. I also think that in given the spur of the moment, possibly weather conditions and the distance from the offense, it may even be harder to measure the actual difficulty it would be for a witness to write an accurate statement of events when witnessing a crime. This can obviously be an issue when investigators have eye witnesses to a crime because it could lead them in the wrong direction if the witness was mistaken. Interesting activity though!
I took this test and received a sad score. I normally find i'm really observant in my surroundings,etc. I found this test so difficult though it began stressing me out! It was so hard i'm guessing it has to be fairly accurate. I plan on taking it again- with less distractions. The whole time though i kept trying to remind myself that in a crime scenario I would have oodles of distractions and not nearly as much time to focus as what i had in this test. It was a very good test though!
This face test was very difficult. I got a 74%, although I would like to see how I did on the first portion of the test as compared to the last, when you have to do 6 faces all in one. I typically consider myself to be fairly good at remembering faces; however, this activity showed me how much I rely on things like hair style and color, clothing, piercing and other things to do this identifying. That is not a good thing, considering those are mostly things that could be altered by a criminal if I was trying to identify someone. However, the website said that people routinely score around 80%, which is still a very high number. However, it also means that 2 out of 10 people are miss-identified. I think this shows the witness testimonies are important, and should definitely be considered important evidence, but they need to be taking with a grain of salt. This reminded me about a show I saw a long time ago about how accurate eye witness identification is, it was like NBC Dateline or something. I tried to track down a link to the site, but instead found another one, with a list to a bunch of shows about this topic.
http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/520.php
This whole website is actually about wrongful convictions, and other people have posted it. However, this specific link is to shows that have explored the topic
I just took this test and got a 75% Wowzas! I can totally see how a victim could become completely overwhelmed doing a line up or trying to construct a sketch of their perpetrator. I always considered myself very detail oriented and attentive, however after viewing those I don't think I'd be very good at distinguishing various key characteristics. I was getting extremely frustrated with this too, because I felt like it was taking forever, and that the faces looked too much alike. This kind of makes me wonder how wise it was of me to date a twin... haha. All in all though I think this was an excellent test at providing how difficult it would be to determine a suspect.
This website is very helpful in showing just how difficult it can be to recall a person's face. I received a 79% but even that is not significant if it was used in court. It seems that most of the time when someone is trying to recall a face for legal reasons that person has been hurt or taken advantage of in some way, whether it be sexual harrassment, burglary, robbery, etc. After something traumatic it is a normal psychological response to remove that event from your memory. Then if you are asked to give an accurate description of the person the memory might be vague or not there at all. This is where it becomes discouraging. Even though there is an eye witness it can be very difficult to receive evidence that will hold up in court and show that the possible suspect is a criminal. Memory plays a large part in eyewitness identification. I found a website that gives an excellent example of misidentification. It also goes into detail on how and why memories can change over time. Understanding memory can lead one to understand how reliable/unreliable eyewitness identifcation is.
http://www.visualexpert.com/Resources/eyewitnessmemory.html