Lack of proper sleep impairs facial recognition

Lack of proper sleep can impact the accuracy of face identification, researchers have found, suggesting that the crucial “passport task” by officers can be affected 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.

Researchers from the University of New South Wales in Australia and the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom, found that 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. 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.

Researchers said that while most people would typically expect to perform well on these tasks, many are surprised at how many errors they make.