Face matching in a long task: enforced rest and desk-switching cannot maintain identification accuracy

Abstract

In face matching, observers have to decide whether two photographs depict the same person or different people. This task is not only remarkably difficult but accuracy declines further during prolonged testing. The current study investigated whether this decline in long tasks can be eliminated with regular rest-breaks (Experiment 1) or room-switching (Experiment 2). Both experiments replicated the accuracy decline for long face-matching tasks and showed that this could not be eliminated with rest or room-switching. These findings suggest that person identification in applied settings, such as passport control, might be particularly error-prone due to the long and repetitive nature of the task. The experiments also show that it is difficult to counteract these problems.

Face Matching Impairment in Developmental Prosopagnosia

“…In short, DPÕs did not have difficulty in telling faces apart, but in telling them together. ;Alenezi & Bindemann, 2013;Bindemann, Fysh & Johnston, 2015). Signal detection analyses are consistent with this account (see Supplementary Materials), showing more conservative criterion scores in DP relative to control participants (i.e.…”

The Kent Face Matching Test

“…This study presents the KFMT as a new test of face matching and examined its characteristics across two experiments. Performance on the KFMT correlated with the GFMT in Experiment 1 and also followed the accuracy profile that is found over longer experiments with this test in Experiment 2 (see Alenezi & Bindemann, ; Alenezi et al ., ). This indicates that both tests measure similar underlying processes.…”

“…This pattern is reflected by a shift in criterion , which indicates that a response bias to classify an increasing number of faces as identity matches emerged over time. Such a bias has also been found in recent work using the optimized stimuli of the GFMT, but with initial accuracy levels that exceed 80% (Alenezi & Bindemann, ; Alenezi et al ., ; Bindemann et al ., ). The data from Experiment 2 therefore converge with Experiment 1 to indicate that the KFMT provides a more challenging test for face matching than the GFMT, but preserves the behavioural characteristics of this test.…”

“…In this experiment, observers completed the longer version of the KFMT, comprising 200 match trials and 20 mismatch trials. Current research shows that when matching optimized GFMT faces for a prolonged period, observers develop a response bias to erroneously classify pairs as identity matches (Alenezi & Bindemann, ; Alenezi, Bindemann, Fysh, & Johnston, ; Bindemann et al ., ). If the KFMT produces behavioural effects comparable to the GFMT, then such a response bias should also be found here, strengthening the results of Experiment 1.…”

Human–Computer Interaction in Face Matching

“…Subsequent studies suggest that performance is further impeded by factors that are relevant to passport control. For example, accuracy on mismatch trials deteriorates considerably over a single prolonged session (Alenezi & Bindemann, 2013;Alenezi, Bindemann, Fysh, & Johnston, 2015), as well as under time pressure (Bindemann, Fysh, Cross, & Watts, 2016;Fysh & Bindemann, 2017), and when faces are viewed in the context of realistic photo ID (Bindemann & Sandford, 2011;Kemp, Towell, & Pike, 1997;McCaffery & Burton, 2016). In addition, even passport officers have been found to make a substantial number of errors when comparing same-day face photographs (White, Kemp, Jenkins, Matheson, & Burton, 2014).…”