Daniel Carragher

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Lecturer at The University of Adelaide

“The cheerleader effect” refers to the increase in attractiveness that an individual face experiences when seen in a group of other faces. It has been proposed that the cheerleader effect occurs because (a) the visual system rapidly summarises a group of faces into an ensemble representation, (b) which is hypothesised to be highly attractive becaus...

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments around the world now recommend, or require, that their citizens cover the lower half of their face in public. Consequently, many people now wear surgical face masks in public. We investigated whether surgical face masks affected the performance of human observers, and a state-of-the-art face re...

The cheerleader effect occurs when the same face is rated to be more attractive when it is seen in a group compared to when seen alone. We investigated whether this phenomenon also occurs for trustworthiness judgements, and examined how these effects are influenced by the characteristics of the individual being evaluated and those of the group they...

Automated Facial Recognition Systems (AFRS) are used by governments, law enforcement agencies, and private businesses to verify the identity of individuals. Although previous research has compared the performance of AFRS and humans on tasks of one-to-one face matching, little is known about how effectively human operators can use these AFRS as deci...

To slow the spread of COVID-19, many people now wear face masks in public. Face masks impair our ability to identify faces, which can cause problems for professional staff who identify offenders or members of the public. Here, we investigate whether performance on a masked face matching task can be improved by training participants to compare diagn...

We present three experiments to study the effects of giving information about the decision of an automated face recognition (AFR) system to participants attempting to decide whether two face images show the same person. We make three contributions designed to make our results applicable to real‐word use: participants are given the true response of...

Accurately determining whether two images show the same person is a surprisingly difficult task, which becomes even harder if one or both faces are wearing medical face masks. Attempts to improve unfamiliar face matching accuracy have generally had limited success. Although one brief training program improved masked face matching accuracy by 4.9%,...

The human face is commonly used for identity verification. While this task was once exclusively performed by humans, technological advancements have seen automated facial recognition systems (AFRS) integrated into many identification scenarios. Although many state-of-the-art AFRS are exceptionally accurate, they often require human oversight or inv...

A handful of recent studies have investigated human performance on one-to-one face matching tasks when assisted by an Automated Facial Recognition System (AFRS). The aim of the current study was to validate a new experimental trial procedure, which builds on that first introduced by Carragher and Hancock (2023). Here we recruited a final sample of...

Mask wearing has been required in various settings since the outbreak of COVID-19, and research has shown that identity judgements are difficult for faces wearing masks. To date, however, the majority of experiments on face identification with masked faces tested humans and computer algorithms using images with superimposed masks rather than images...

Carragher and Hancock (2023) investigated how individuals performed in a one-to-one face matching task when assisted by an Automated Facial Recognition System (AFRS). Across five pre-registered experiments they found evidence of suboptimal aided performance, with AFRS-assisted individuals consistently failing to reach the level of performance the A...

The human face is commonly used for identity verification. While this task was once exclusively performed by humans, technological advancements have seen Automated Facial Recognition Systems (AFRS) integrated into many identification scenarios. Although many state-of-the-art AFRS are exceptionally accurate, they often require human oversight, such...

Accurately determining whether two images show the same person is a surprisingly difficult task, which becomes even harder if one or both faces are wearing medical face masks. Previous attempts to improve face matching accuracy have generally had limited success. One brief training program has been shown to improve masked face matching accuracy by...

In this Journal Club, Daniel Carragher describes a paper on first impressions from facial appearance.

To slow the spread of COVID-19, many people now wear face masks in public. Face masks impair our ability to identify faces, which can cause problems for professional staff who must identify offenders and members of the public. Here, we investigate whether performance on a masked face matching task can be improved by training participants to compare...

Healthy individuals typically show a leftward attentional bias in the allocation of spatial attention along the horizontal plane, a phenomenon known as pseudoneglect, which relies on a right hemispheric dominance for visuospatial processing. Also, healthy individuals tend to overestimate the upper hemispace when orienting attention along the vertic...

Individual faces are rated as more attractive when presented in a group compared to when presented individually; a finding dubbed the ‘cheerleader effect’. As a relatively recent discovery, the conditions necessary to observe the effect are not clearly understood. We sought to better define these conditions by examining two parameters associated wi...

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments around the world now recommend, or require, their citizens to cover the lower half of their face in public. Consequently, many people now wear surgical face masks in public. We investigated whether surgical face masks affected the performance of human observers, and a state-of-the-art face reco...

The “cheerleader effect” occurs when the same face is perceived to be significantly more attractive when seen among a group of faces compared to alone. Since perceived attractiveness decreases with additional viewing time, we investigated whether the cheerleader effect occurs simply because the target face is seen for less time in a group than it i...

The “cheerleader effect” occurs when the same face is perceived to be significantly more attractive when seen in a group of faces compared to alone. As perceptions of attractiveness decrease with additional viewing time, we investigated whether the cheerleader effect occurs simply because the target face is seen for less time in a group than it is...

“The cheerleader effect” refers to the increase in attractiveness that an individual face experiences when seen in a group of other faces. It has been proposed that the cheerleader effect occurs because (a) the visual system rapidly summarises a group of faces into an ensemble representation, (b) which is hypothesised to be highly attractive becaus...

Despite the cautionary reminder to never “judge a book by its cover”, we regularly judge others based upon their facial appearance. Far from meaning that we are all terribly judgmental, these trait impressions occur automatically. Even though they are often not accurate, the trait judgments that we make about others can influence our own decision m...

Faces are perceived to be more attractive when seen in a group than alone, a phenomenon known as ‘the cheerleader effect’. The visual system automatically creates ensemble representations of groups, and the recalled characteristics of individual items from the group are biased toward the ensemble average. Across three experiments, we investigated w...

The cheerleader effect occurs when the same individual appears to be more attractive when seen in a group, compared to alone. As observers over-attend to visual information presented in the left visual field, we investigated whether the spatial arrangement of the faces in a group would influence the magnitude of the cheerleader effect. In Experimen...

A turn of the head can be used to convey or conceal emotion, as the left side of the face is more expressive than the right. As the left cheek moves more when smiling, the present study investigated whether perceived trustworthiness is lateralized to the left cheek, using a trust game paradigm. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to share mone...

Movement asymmetries in the face result in the left side of the face appearing happier than the right, an expression which is often related to the perception of trustworthiness. Using the trust game, in which participants are asked to share money with partners, we investigated whether the left side of the face is seen as more trustworthy than the r...