排隊檢查護照的經歷並不輕鬆：檢察官看看你的護照……看看你……再看看你的護照……再看看你，真是一種精神折磨。但站在他們的角度，他們努力想要弄清楚你的臉是不是和那頁紙上的縮略圖中的一樣，這可不是一項簡單的任務。
「人們常常意識不到自己的（認臉能力）竟如此糟糕。」澳大利亞新南威爾斯大學（University of New South Wales）的認知心理學家大衛·懷特（David White）說。他甚至還測試過澳大利亞護照中心工作人員的認臉能力。「他們的表現並不比一群未經訓練的大學生好。」
在他的研究中，懷特和同事調查了睡眠不足（每晚睡眠時長不足6個半小時）對面部識別的影響。事實證明，糟糕的睡眠確實會在人臉匹配任務中導致更多的錯誤答案；與休息充分的人相比，患有失眠症（即睡眠不足並伴有焦慮等其他症狀）的研究對象得分也更低。
但是這裡有一個轉折：「儘管失眠症組裡的受試者常常犯錯，他們反而……[查看全文]
Poor Sleepers Worse at Recognizing Unfamiliar Faces
Standing in line at passport control isn't the most relaxing experience. The officer looks at your passport… at you… back at your passport… back at you. Kind of nerve wracking. But put yourself intheir shoes. They're trying to figure out if your face is actually the same one as that little thumbnail image on the page. Not the easiest task.
"People are often surprised at how poor they are." David White, a cognitive psychologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia. He's even tested Australian passport agents at the task. "Their performance was no better than a group of untrained university students."
In his latest study, White and his colleagues investigated how poor sleep--less than six and a half hours a night--might affect facial recognition. Turns out, bad sleep did lead to more wrong answers on a face-matching task. And study subjects suffering from insomnia, meaning poor sleep plus other symptoms like anxiety, scored badly, too, compared to well-rested subjects.
But here's the twist: "When they made errors, people in this insomnia group, they actually...[full transcript]