Des Moines Register
09-21-06
ISU 'morphing' study winner of national prize
By LISA ROSSI
REGISTER AMES BUREAU
A new study by Gary Wells, a distinguished professor of psychology at Iowa
State University, reports that morphing together composite sketches used in
criminal investigations is more effective than using just one.
A composite sketch was recently used by Missouri police in hopes of finding the
person who slashed the throat of a young mother before kidnapping the mother's
baby.
On Wednesday, authorities filed charges against Shannon Torrez, 36, of
Lonedell, Mo., also known as Shannon Beck. The suspect was arrested Tuesday
after her sister-in-law, Dorothy Torrez, contacted authorities.
Lisa Hasel, and ISU doctoral student in psychology, who joined Wells on the
research, said police in Missouri would have had a better composite if they had
more witnesses from which to draw information.
"It would be beneficial to have multiple composites made, because in general
people are not readily able to identify people from composites, because they are
poor likenesses," she said.
Hasel joined with Wells to author a research paper titled "Catching the Bad Guy:
Morphing Composite Faces Helps," which has been accepted for publication in
Law and Human Behavior, a professional journal. The study was awarded a
national prize by the Association for Psychological Science.
The researchers selected 16 faces from a database, according to an ISU press
release. Each fell into four categories: Asian females with long black hair,
Caucasian females with short brown hair, Caucasian males with short brown
hair, and Caucasian males with medium-length black hair.
In the composite generation phase, participants were asked to look at one of four
target faces in a specific category.
After each face was removed, they were asked to create four composites apiece
using the facial composite software called FACES. After building each
composite, the creator rated their own compositions for how similar they thought
their composite was to the face they had viewed.
The composites were then morphed by an experimenter - resulting in 64
composites and 16 morphed composites.
The Associate Press contributed to this report.