In order to investigate the effects of face pose, pose change, and delay on face recognition, 76 white male police officers were shown 16 achromatic slides of men's faces. Recognition tests were administered either immediately or after a 2-to 3-day delay. For study and on the test, half of the photographs were presented in a full-face pose and half in a three-quarter pose. Within these groups, half of the photos were seen in the same pose for study and test (matched testing), and half were seen in different poses (unmatched testing). Recognition was better for three-quarter pose targets than for full-face targets and for matched than for unmatched tests. Recognition accuracy decreased with delay, as did the difference in accuracy between matched and unmatched conditions.Although the evidence is not clear-cut, there are indications that the human face is recognized more easily in some poses than in others. Patterson and Baddeley (1977, Experiment 2) found that recognition memory for three-quarter poses was superior to memory for profiles. Davies, Ellis, and Shepherd (1978b), however, found no difference in recognition performance when full-face and three-quarter poses were compared. Laughery, Alexander, and Lane (1971) found lower hit rates with profiles than with three-quarter and full-face views, although the difference in performance was not statistically significant. It should be noted that the above investigators used measures of performance that did not take false alarms into account. Davies et al. and Laughery et al. used subjects' hit rates as the measure of performance, and Patterson and Baddeley used the percentage of the targets correctly identified. All of the researchers presented the subjects with a single group of photos on the test, from which they were allowed to choose as many potentially correct targets as they wished. Hence the hit rates could have been contaminated by differences between subjects in the total number of targets chosen. Because identical hit rates might not reflect identical levels of ac-The present study was supported in part by a grant from Western Reserve College.The author would like to thank J. F. Pagan and D. K. Detterman for suggestions and comments on this research.

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