Person recognition: Qualitative differences in how forensic face examiners and untrained people rely on the face versus the body for identification

ABSTRACT

Professional forensic face examiners surpass untrained individuals on challenging face-identity matching tasks. We investigated qualitative/strategic differences in how forensic face examiners versus untrained people perform identity-matching tasks by analysing item responses (ratings of the likelihood that two images show the same person). We developed a novel analysis for quantifying item difficulty for participant groups and establishing group “winners” for items in conditions of interest. “Wisdom-of-the-crowds” effects were explored by fusing responses from varying numbers of participants to amplify strategic differences across groups. Results indicated that examiners use the internal face more effectively than untrained participants, but failed to exploit identity information in the external face and body. We also show that accuracy measures for examiners and controls must include both same-identity verifications and different-identity rejections to understand the role of perceptual skill and response bias in performance differences across participant groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Face recognition
• forensic facial examiners
• body recognition
• item analysis
• statistical fusion
• expertise

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Although it would be helpful to know the amount and type of training of the examiners, this information was not available to us. We note however that it is highly likely that quality and quantity of training varied across examiners.

2 This threshold was set arbitrarily to include a sufficient number of stimuli for the experiment.

3 The max number was chosen to be 14, corresponding to the number of participants in the smallest group (the FISWG controls).

4 Again, ties were dealt with by splitting points.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Institute of Justice [grant number 2015-IJ-CX-K014]; National Institute of Standards and Technology [grant number 70NANB15H241].