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FORENSICS: TRTW: Face Recognition
TALK 1: What do you know about Facial Recognition as Forensic Evidence? How is it
done? How accurate do you think it is?
READ:
Superior Face Recognition: A Very Special Super Power
Surprising research into "super-recognizers" By Anna K. Bobak, Sarah Bate on February 2, 2016
(1)For years scientists have studied the biological basis of human speed, and reported
that the fastest athletes are short and muscular in build. However, these conclusions
were challenged in 2008 when a new athlete, substantially taller than previous worldrecord holders, was identified as the fastest man in history. Usain Bolt presented the
purest expression of human speed on the planet – and raised the possibility that
scientists may need to entirely change the way they think about human biometrics.
(2)In the same vein, one might ask whether examinations of the brain at its height of
efficiency will present new insights into its workings. Although researchers have
historically examined people with a very high IQ (i.e. those with more generalized skills),
it has become more and more clear that some individuals only perform extraordinarily
well on specific cognitive tasks. Among the most interesting of these is facial identity
recognition. In fact, the extraordinary skills of these so-called “super-recognizers” do not
seem to correlate with IQ or memory for objects, yet they claim to recognize faces which
they have only briefly been seen before, or have undergone substantial changes in
appearance. For instance, in a recent scientific report from our laboratory (unpublished),
one super-recognizer described bumping into a girl from a children’s’ swimming class he
coached as a teenager. He recognized her immediately, despite the fact that he’d not seen
her for over ten years and she was now an adult.
(3)So how can these people change the way that scientists think about the human brain?
For many years researchers have generally agreed that faces are “special.” That is, we
have dedicated brain regions that are used only for face recognition, and we look at faces
in a different manner to other objects. This “configurable” or “holistic” strategy refers to
our ability to see the face as a whole, taking into account the spacing between features as
well as the shapes of the features themselves. The idea that faces are special is supported
by findings that some people acquire prosopagnosia (face blindness) following damage
to the face recognition areas of the brain, and many people with prosopagnosia can no
longer process faces in a holistic way. This evidence suggests that holistic processing is
essential for successful face recognition, and perhaps super-recognizers rely on this
strategy to a greater extent than typical people. However, only modest links have been
reported between face recognition ability and holistic processing skills, suggesting other
factors may be at play.
(4)Eye-tracking technology has frequently been used by psychologists to identify the
regions of the face that are particularly informative in face recognition. Typical people
tend to focus on the eyes, suggesting they carry important information about facial
identity. In fact, some people with prosopagnosia avoid the eye region, and instead look
at the mouth. Could it be that super-recognizers look at the eyes for an even longer
period of time than typical people? Work in our laboratory recently examined this issue,
comparing the eye movement patterns of super-recognizers, people with prosopagnosia,
and typical participants. As predicted, the participants with prosopagnosia spent less
time on the eyes, yet it also turned out that super-recognizers spent more time viewing
the nose. These findings challenge existing conclusions, suggesting that it is the center of
the face, rather than the eye region, that is optimal for facial identity recognition.
(5)In addition to providing new opportunities to further our understanding of the face
recognition system, super-recognizers may also be valuable in policing and security
settings. While it is easy to recognize faces of our family and friends, the recognition or
matching of unfamiliar faces is a very difficult task. Many errors are made even by
people who complete face recognition tasks on an everyday basis, and
extensive experience in passport control or CCTV viewing doesn’t seem to help
performance. In a bid to improve this situation, London’s Metropolitan Police have
created a super-recognizer unit that is used to spot criminals in a crowd or within CCTV
footage, and these officers helped identify numerous perpetrators in the 2011 London
riots. It’s easy to spot other potential roles for super-recognizers – issues of national
security are currently paramount, and they may spot wanted or missing people more
readily than typical officers.
(6)The London unit currently identifies super-recognizers by analyzing years of on-thejob performance, but it would be much easier if new recruits could be identified by a
simple battery of computerized tests. We recently addressed this issue by recreating
some real-world face recognition tasks in the laboratory. In the first test, participants
viewed a series of trials with a face at the top of the screen and a grid of 10 faces below.
Super-recognizers outperformed typical participants by 20% when deciding whether or
not the target face was present in the line-up. In a second test, participants viewed 20
images of faces that were extracted from good quality CCTV footage. They were later
asked to recognize those faces when displayed under poor lighting conditions. While this
was a more difficult task, the super-recognizers were on average 8% more likely to
recognize the faces than typical participants. However, while some super-recognizers
were very good at matching faces in the first task, the same individuals were not
necessarily so good at remembering multiple faces in the second test.
(7)It seems then that while some super-recognizers have superior face memory skills,
“super-spotters” may be used in the policing of crowds, and “super-matchers” may be
useful for visa verification or passport control – and a variety of laboratory-based tasks
are needed that can identify potential candidates who will excel in a range of real-world
scenarios. And these findings bring us back to our original question – what can superrecognizers tell us about the human face recognition system? Well, it seems that this
“special” system can be further divided into different, independent mechanisms. Further
research examining brain functioning in super-recognizers who are apt at different face
recognition tasks may shed further light into the precise workings of this very special
system within the human brain.
Do you think you may be a super-recognizer?
Take our test and find out: http://prosopagnosiaresearch.org/super-recogniser
TALK 2:
(a)What 3 things did you learn in the article that you DID NOT KNOW?
(b) What did the article make you wonder about?
WRITE:
Based on your reading and your discussion, should Facial Recognition by Criminalists be
considered valid evidence? In that regard, should facial recognition be carried out only
by a human? A software-program? Both? Neither? Explain your thoughts with 2
opinions and at least 1 supporting fact from the article. (7 sentence minimum)
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