The effects of low levels of fatigue on face recognition among individuals and team members

The ability to identify particular faces among a crowd or line up is important in various contexts. However, little is known about how fatigue due to sleep deficit affects performance nor about the moderating role of team membership. UK Army Reservists (n=182) indicated whether line ups of four faces included either of two target faces. They did this while either alone or in a team and while fatigued or alert. Among individuals, fatigue led to a greater bias toward identifying targets as absent. Fatigued team members experienced bias toward absent responses but to a lesser extent than did fatigued individuals. This did not translate into improved performance; fatigued teams had an equal proportion of hits but more false alarms than fatigued individuals.