Neural reliability as a marker of face identity processing abilities? Insights from Berlin Police officers

Face identity processing (FIP) skills vary greatly among individuals, and the sources of this variation have increasingly attracted researchers’ interest. Beyond theoretically relevant, they are of applied importance, e.g. in law enforcement and security professions, where FIP assessment needs to be both reliable and objective. Fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS) EEG provides such an objective measure, but the relationship with behavioral FIP performance, and differential reliability remain underinvestigated. In this registered report, we analyze data from eight challenging and professionally relevant behavioral tests, together with neural data from three FPVS-EEG experiments targeting object and face categorization, as well as neural face discrimination tested twice with a 2.5 year interval. Our goal is to describe the relationship between neural reliability and FIP abilities in a systematic and comprehensive manner.