Abstract
Advances in digital technology mean that the creation of visually compelling photographic fakes is growing at an incredible speed. The prevalence of manipulated photos in our everyday lives invites an important, yet largely unanswered, question: Can people detect photo forgeries? Previous research using simple computer-generated stimuli suggests people are poor at detecting geometrical inconsistencies within a scene. We do not know, however, whether such limitations also apply to real-world scenes that contain common properties that the human visual system is attuned to processing. In two experiments we asked people to detect and locate manipulations within images of real-world scenes. Subjects demonstrated a limited ability to detect original and manipulated images. Furthermore, across both experiments, even when subjects correctly detected manipulated images, they were often unable to locate the manipulation. People’s ability to detect manipulated images was positively correlated with the extent of disruption to the underlying structure of the pixels in the photo. We also explored whether manipulation type and individual differences were associated with people’s ability to identify manipulations. Taken together, our findings show, for the first time, that people have poor ability to identify whether a real-world image is original or has been manipulated. The results have implications for professionals working with digital images in legal, media, and other domains.
Highlights
In 2015, one of the world’s most prestigious photojournalism events—The World Press Photo Contest—was shrouded in controversy following the disqualification of 22 entrants, including an overall prize winner, for manipulating their photo entries
The results show that people have some ability to detect and locate manipulations, performance is far from perfect
Using the more liberal accuracy classification, that is, both Detect and locate (DL) and detected but not accurately located (DnL) responses for detection, we found that three factors had an effect on likelihood to respond correctly: response time, general beliefs about the prevalence of photo manipulation, and interest in photography
Summary
In 2015, one of the world’s most prestigious photojournalism events—The World Press Photo Contest—was shrouded in controversy following the disqualification of 22 entrants, including an overall prize winner, for manipulating their photo entries. World Press Photo responded by issuing a new code of ethics for the forthcoming contest that stipulated entrants “must ensure their pictures provide an accurate and fair representation of the scene they witnessed so the audience is not misled” (World Press Photo). They introduced new safeguards for detecting manipulated images, including a computerized photo-verification test for Nightingale et al Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications (2017) 2:30 entries reaching the penultimate round of the competition. To what extent can lay people distinguish authentic photos from fakes?
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