Abstract
SummaryThe accurate identification of an unfamiliar individual from a face photo is a critical factor in several applied situations (e.g., border control). Despite this, matching faces to photographic ID is highly prone to error. In lieu of effective training measures, which could reduce face matching errors, the selection of “super‐recognisers” (SRs) provides the most promising route to combat misidentification or fraud. However, to date, super‐recognition has been defined and tested using almost exclusively “own‐race” face memory and matching tests. Here, across three studies, we test Caucasian participants' performance on own‐ and other‐race face identification tasks (GFMT, MFMT, CFMT+, EFMT, CFMT‐Chinese). Our findings show that compared to controls, high‐performing typical recognisers (Studies 1 and 2) and SRs (Study 3) show superior performance on both the own‐ and other‐race tests. These findings suggest that recruiting SRs in ethnically diverse applied settings could be advantageous.
Highlights
The use of face photos for accurate identity verification is critical in maintaining border security and ensuring that correct convictions occur within the criminal justice system
While research shows that accuracy on other-race tasks is poorer than own-race face tasks, here we find that EFMT-long accuracy was significantly higher than both the Glasgow Face Matching Test (GFMT) and Models Face Matching Test (MFMT) performances (M = 85%, SD = 8%, Range = 60%-98%; F(1,110) = 17.29, p < .001, ηp2 = .14 for the GFMT, F(1,110) = 122.26, p < .001, ηp2 = .53 for the MFMT)
This confirms that this short version of the EFMT-short is challenging enough to provide an unfamiliar face matching other-race effect
Summary
The use of face photos for accurate identity verification is critical in maintaining border security and ensuring that correct convictions occur within the criminal justice system. It is well established that matching pairs of unfamiliar faces is highly prone to error (Burton, 2009; Burton & Jenkins, 2011; Davis & Valentine, 2009; Hancock, Bruce, & Burton, 2000; Jenkins & Burton, 2011; Johnston & Edmonds, 2009; Robertson, 2018; Robertson & Burton, 2016) Errors within this context may lead to travellers with fraudulent passports entering the country illegally, or innocent suspects being convicted of a crime. This non-trivial level of error can be exacerbated by a number of other factors such as greater within-person variability in the images (e.g. changes in pose, expression, hairstyle; Bruce et al, 1999; Bindemann & Sandford, 2011; Megreya, Sandford & Burton, 2013), the frequency of mismatch items (Papesh & Goldinger, 2014), time pressure (Bindemann, Fysh, Cross, & Watts, 2016; Fysh & Bindemann, 2017), matching fatigue
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