And Like That, They were Gone: A Failure to Remember Recently Attended Unique Faces

Attribute amnesia (AA) is a phenomenon in which participants are unable to answer an unexpected question about an attended attribute of the most recent target stimulus. Similarly, eyewitness identification is a real-life example of a memory test that is unexpected at the time of seeing an alleged perpetrator. We are thus interested in whether AA is generalizable to novel face identification, a finding that would help us understand the source of memory failures in eyewitness identification and a variety of real-world situations. We found that when participants were unexpectedly asked to identify a face, performance was poor, even though they had just attended to that face seconds ago. This finding shows that unexpected face identification is inaccurate even when the face had just been attended to and suffered minimal decay and interference, implying that some failures of eyewitness identification were already inevitable just after the crime had been witnessed.