Catching wanted people at the border: prospective person memory and face matching in border control decisions

ABSTRACT

Border control officers may be on the lookout for wanted people while they verify that travellers match their passport photos. We developed a novel experimental paradigm to investigate whether people are more likely to report that someone is wanted if they also believe that person is using a fraudulent passport. In two experiments, undergraduate students assumed the role of a border control officer and completed multiple “shifts” of a face matching task designed to simulate a passport verification check. Before each shift participants viewed posters of wanted people and were instructed to report any sightings if a wanted person appeared in any of the images during the passport check. Participants were more likely to say an individual was wanted if they also believed the person did not match their passport image. In addition, the accuracy of wanted person sightings was reduced for trials with nonmatching passports compared to trials with matching passports. This suggests wanted people with matching passports were easier to spot because participants had an additional image to compare with their memory of the person in the wanted poster.

KEYWORDS:

• Prospective person memory
• face matching
• border security
• wanted people

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Open Data. The data are openly accessible at https://osf.io/4n6c8/

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in [Open Science Framework] at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/4N6C8.

Ethics approval

This study was approved by Simon Fraser University’s Research Ethics Board (approval number: 30001634) and was performed in accordance with the ethical standards as laid down in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments.