However, if witnesses are making relative judgments, those witnesses who could have selected the guilty suspect will exhibit what is referred to as a target-to-foil shift, and instead select the next best option from the target removed lineup.
Thus, the present study examined whether differential sociocultural experiences influence fine-grained facial age perception by asking participants to make relative age judgments for male Asian faces.
Specifically, there was increased parietal engagement (a visuo-spatial attentional region) when East Asians made absolute judgments compared to relative judgments, whereas Westerners showed increased parietal activity when making relative judgments compared to absolute judgments.
In addition to making relative age judgments for stimulus faces belonging to the same age group, in 4 control trials, participants also made relative age judgments for the 100% Old average male adult face paired with the 0% Old average male child face.
Japanese, Chinese, and Asian-Canadian young adults made relative age judgments (i.e., which of these two faces is older?) for East Asian faces.
They interpreted this finding as evidence that simultaneous lineup decisions were made using relative judgments, as defined by relative judgment theory (Lindsay & Wells 1985; Wells 1984).
Moreover, while this is a type of relative judgment task, it differs from previous designs (Mateeff & Gourevich, 1983; Müsseler & van der Heijden, 2004; Müsseler et al., 1999) in which localization judgments were made relative to a comparison object or landmark present within the display.
Perceptual judgments at an affordance boundary might be more sensitive because they are made relative to a categorical boundary (e.g., Bertamini, Yang, & Proffitt, 1998).
"We're not making a relative judgment about whether you're going to drop down dead if you eat at these places," she explains.
