Abstract
It is well established that our ability to match unfamiliar faces is highly error prone (Burton & Jenkins, 2011). Yet despite this we still rely heavily on photographic identification to prove our identity. Conversely, when matching familiar faces, we perform almost perfectly (Bruce et al., 2001). When we are familiar with a face we are able to overcome inherent within-person variability to make an accurate match (Jenkins et al, 2011). However, when we are unfamiliar, we lack this experience and are forced into a pictorial based match. In this series of studies we ask whether this within-person variability can be used to train individuals in unfamiliar face recognition. We used a difficult face matching task to show that the presence of within-person variability can improve performance for target individuals, but not for face matching in general. Furthermore, trial-by-trial feedback was introduced to demonstrate performance can be improved upon further. We consider the implications of these results for training face matching performance.