Photo-ID is widely used in security settings, despite research showing that viewers find it very difficult to match unfamiliar faces. Here we test participants with specialist experience and training ...in the task: passport-issuing officers. First, we ask officers to compare photos to live ID-card bearers, and observe high error rates, including 14% false acceptance of 'fraudulent' photos. Second, we compare passport officers with a set of student participants, and find equally poor levels of accuracy in both groups. Finally, we observe that passport officers show no performance advantage over the general population on a standardised face-matching task. Across all tasks, we observe very large individual differences: while average performance of passport staff was poor, some officers performed very accurately--though this was not related to length of experience or training. We propose that improvements in security could be made by emphasising personnel selection.
Identifying unfamiliar faces is surprisingly error-prone, even for experienced professionals who perform this task regularly. Previous attempts to train this ability have been largely unsuccessful, ...leading many to conclude that face identity processing is hard-wired and not amenable to further perceptual learning. Here, we take a novel expert knowledge elicitation approach to training, based on the feature-based comparison strategy used by high-performing professional facial examiners. We show that instructing novices to focus on the facial features that are most diagnostic of identity for these experts-the ears and facial marks (e.g., scars, freckles and blemishes)-improves accuracy on unfamiliar face matching tasks by 6%. This training takes just 6 min to complete and yet accounts for approximately half of experts' superiority on the task. Benefits of training are strongest when diagnostic features are clearly visible and absent when participants are trained to rely on nondiagnostic features. Our data-driven approach contrasts with theory-driven training that is designed to improve holistic face processing mechanisms associated with familiar face recognition. This suggests that protocols which bypass the core face recognition system-and instead reorient attention to features that are undervalued by novices-offer a more promising route to training for unfamiliar face matching.
In recent years, wide deployment of automatic face recognition systems has been accompanied by substantial gains in algorithm performance. However, benchmarking tests designed to evaluate these ...systems do not account for the errors of human operators, who are often an integral part of face recognition solutions in forensic and security settings. This causes a mismatch between evaluation tests and operational accuracy. We address this by measuring user performance in a face recognition system used to screen passport applications for identity fraud. Experiment 1 measured target detection accuracy in algorithm-generated 'candidate lists' selected from a large database of passport images. Accuracy was notably poorer than in previous studies of unfamiliar face matching: participants made over 50% errors for adult target faces, and over 60% when matching images of children. Experiment 2 then compared performance of student participants to trained passport officers-who use the system in their daily work-and found equivalent performance in these groups. Encouragingly, a group of highly trained and experienced "facial examiners" outperformed these groups by 20 percentage points. We conclude that human performance curtails accuracy of face recognition systems-potentially reducing benchmark estimates by 50% in operational settings. Mere practise does not attenuate these limits, but superior performance of trained examiners suggests that recruitment and selection of human operators, in combination with effective training and mentorship, can improve the operational accuracy of face recognition systems.
Face recognition is thought to rely on representations that encode holistic properties. Paradoxically, professional forensic examiners who identify unfamiliar faces by comparing facial images are ...trained to adopt a feature-by-feature comparison strategy. Here we tested the effectiveness of this strategy by asking participants to rate facial feature similarity prior to making same/different identity decisions to pairs of face images. Experiment 1 provided preliminary evidence that rating feature similarity improves unfamiliar face matching accuracy in novice participants. In Experiment 2, we found benefits of this procedure over and above rating similarity of personality traits and image quality parameters, suggesting that benefits are not solely attributable to general increases in attention. In Experiment 3, we then compared performance of trained forensic facial image examiners to novice participants, and found that examiners displayed: i) superior face matching accuracy; ii) smaller face inversion and feature inversion effects; and iii) feature ratings that were more diagnostic of identity. Further, aggregating feature ratings of multiple examiners produced perfect identity discrimination. Based on these quantitative and qualitative differences between experts and novices, we conclude that comparison based on local features confers specific benefits to trained forensic examiners.
Selecting police super-recognisers Dunn, James D; Towler, Alice; Kemp, Richard I ...
PloS one,
05/2023, Letnik:
18, Številka:
5
Journal Article
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People vary in their ability to recognise faces. These individual differences are consistent over time, heritable and associated with brain anatomy. This implies that face identity processing can be ...improved in applied settings by selecting high performers-'super-recognisers' (SRs)-but these selection processes are rarely available for scientific scrutiny. Here we report an 'end-to-end' selection process used to establish an SR 'unit' in a large police force. Australian police officers (n = 1600) completed 3 standardised face identification tests and we recruited 38 SRs from this cohort to complete 10 follow-up tests. As a group, SRs were 20% better than controls in lab-based tests of face memory and matching, and equalled or surpassed accuracy of forensic specialists that currently perform face identification tasks for police. Individually, SR accuracy was variable but this problem was mitigated by adopting strict selection criteria. SRs' superior abilities transferred only partially to body identity decisions where the face was not visible, and they were no better than controls at deciding which visual scene that faces had initially been encountered in. Notwithstanding these important qualifications, we conclude that super-recognisers are an effective solution to improving face identity processing in applied settings.
Face descriptions inform real‐world identification decisions, for example when eyewitnesses describe criminal perpetrators. However, it is unclear how effective face descriptions are for ...identification. Here, we examined the accuracy of face identification from verbal descriptions, and how individual differences in face perception relate to producing and using descriptions for identification. In Study 1, participants completed a face communication task in pairs. Each participant saw a single face, and via verbal communication only, the pair decided if they were viewing the same person or different people. Dyads achieved 72% accuracy, compared to 81% when participants completed the task individually by matching face pairs side‐by‐side. Performance on the face communication and perceptual matching tasks were uncorrelated, perhaps due to low measurement reliability of the face communication task. In subsequent studies, we examined the abilities of face ‘describers’ (Study 2) and ‘identifiers’ separately (Study 3). We found that ‘super‐recognizers’ – people with extremely high perceptual face identification abilities – outperformed controls in both studies. Overall, these results show that people can successfully describe faces for identification. Preliminary evidence suggests that this ability – and the ability use facial descriptions for identification – has some association with perceptual face identification skill.
This article reports the results of a survey of judicial officers' exposure to potentially traumatic stressors in a single state in Australia. An online survey was fully or partially completed by 205 ...serving and retired members of state courts between June and August of 2019. Respondents answered questions in a Yes/No and Likert scale format and provided comments on their experience and recommendations for the future. The survey focused on the prevalence and impact of three kinds of traumatic stress: threats to the person, vicarious trauma, and vilification. It sought to measure prevalence and to identify how different events in the workplace impacted psychological wellbeing and traumatic stress. The overall response rate was 55.3%, with 205 out of 371 judicial officers providing a full or partial response. The results indicated that 61% of respondents had experienced threats of violence to themselves or someone close to them. Three quarters (75.1%) of respondents reported being exposed to events associated with vicarious trauma, and 61 (29.7%) reported symptoms consistent with trauma-related effects. Just over half (52.7%) reported instances of harsh public criticism amounting to vilification. On the Kessler 10 scale of psychological distress 25.9% scored in the "moderate" range, 18.9% in the "high" range, and 9.8% in the "very high" range, much higher than the general population's distress distribution. Respondents also rated the usefulness of current support resources and made recommendation for future resources.
Looking at faces in the wild Varela, Victor P L; Towler, Alice; Kemp, Richard I ...
Scientific reports,
01/2023, Letnik:
13, Številka:
1
Journal Article
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Faces are key to everyday social interactions, but our understanding of social attention is based on experiments that present images of faces on computer screens. Advances in wearable eye-tracking ...devices now enable studies in unconstrained natural settings but this approach has been limited by manual coding of fixations. Here we introduce an automatic 'dynamic region of interest' approach that registers eye-fixations to bodies and faces seen while a participant moves through the environment. We show that just 14% of fixations are to faces of passersby, contrasting with prior screen-based studies that suggest faces automatically capture visual attention. We also demonstrate the potential for this new tool to help understand differences in individuals' social attention, and the content of their perceptual exposure to other people. Together, this can form the basis of a new paradigm for studying social attention 'in the wild' that opens new avenues for theoretical, applied and clinical research.
Facial image comparison practitioners compare images of unfamiliar faces and decide whether or not they show the same person. Given the importance of these decisions for national security and ...criminal investigations, practitioners attend training courses to improve their face identification ability. However, these courses have not been empirically validated so it is unknown if they improve accuracy. Here, we review the content of eleven professional training courses offered to staff at national security, police, intelligence, passport issuance, immigration and border control agencies around the world. All reviewed courses include basic training in facial anatomy and prescribe facial feature (or 'morphological') comparison. Next, we evaluate the effectiveness of four representative courses by comparing face identification accuracy before and after training in novices (n = 152) and practitioners (n = 236). We find very strong evidence that short (1-hour and half-day) professional training courses do not improve identification accuracy, despite 93% of trainees believing their performance had improved. We find some evidence of improvement in a 3-day training course designed to introduce trainees to the unique feature-by-feature comparison strategy used by facial examiners in forensic settings. However, observed improvements are small, inconsistent across tests, and training did not produce the qualitative changes associated with examiners' expertise. Future research should test the benefits of longer examination-focussed training courses and incorporate longitudinal approaches to track improvements caused by mentoring and deliberate practice. In the absence of evidence that training is effective, we advise agencies to explore alternative evidence-based strategies for improving the accuracy of face identification decisions.
Facial recognition errors can jeopardize national security, criminal justice, public safety and civil rights. Here, we compare the most accurate humans and facial recognition technology in a detailed ...lab-based evaluation and international proficiency test for forensic scientists involving 27 forensic departments from 14 countries. We find striking cognitive and perceptual diversity between naturally skilled super-recognizers, trained forensic examiners and deep neural networks, despite them achieving equivalent accuracy. Clear differences emerged in super-recognizers' and forensic examiners' perceptual processing, errors, and response patterns: super-recognizers were fast, biased to respond 'same person' and misidentified people with extreme confidence, whereas forensic examiners were slow, unbiased and strategically avoided misidentification errors. Further, these human experts and deep neural networks disagreed on the similarity of faces, pointing to differences in their representations of faces. Our findings therefore reveal multiple types of facial recognition expertise, with each type lending itself to particular facial recognition roles in operational settings. Finally, we show that harnessing the diversity between individual experts provides a robust method of maximizing facial recognition accuracy. This can be achieved either via collaboration between experts in forensic laboratories, or most promisingly, by statistical fusion of match scores provided by different types of expert.
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