Face recognition's practical relevance: Social bonds, not social butterflies

Research on individual differences in face recognition has provided important foundational insights: their broad range, cognitive specificity, strong heritability, and resilience to change. Elusive, however, has been the key issue of practical relevance: do these individual differences correlate with aspects of life that go beyond the recognition of faces, per se? Though often assumed, especially in social realms, such correlates remain largely theoretical, without empirical support. Here, we investigate an array of potential social correlates of face recognition. We establish social relationship quality as a reproducible correlate. This link generalises across face recognition tasks and across independent samples. In contrast, we detect no robust association with the sheer quantity of social connections, whether measured directly via number of social contacts or indirectly via extraversion-related personality indices. These findings document the existence of a key social correlate of face recognition and provide some of the first evidence to support its practical relevance. At the same time, they challenge the naive assumption that face recognition relates equally to all social outcomes. In contrast, they suggest a focused link of face recognition to the quality, not quantity, of one's social connections.

Face matching and self-insight: A Registered Report investigating individual differences in metacognitive sensitivity, efficiency, and bias

Deciding whether two face photographs depict the same person or not can be a challenging task, and there are substantial individual differences in face matching ability. Far less is known about differences in metacognitive ability; that is, how well people can estimate the quality of their own face matching judgements. The purpose of this Registered Report was to determine the relationship between first-order performance in a face matching task, and three metacognitive measures: metacognitive sensitivity (the information exploited by metacognition), metacognitive efficiency (the quality of metacognitive processing itself), and metacognitive bias (the overall tendency towards high or low confidence). Participants completed a 200-trial unfamiliar face matching task, providing a second-order (metacognitive) confidence rating after each first-order (cognitive) response. Cognitive performance and metacognitive sensitivity showed a substantial positive association (rs = .60), suggesting that they were based on overlapping information, with poorer performers having lower quality information available. Once these differences in the information available to metacognition were accounted for, the quality of metacognitive processing itself (metacognitive efficiency) did not vary systematically with cognitive performance (rs = .00). Moreover, poor performers were not less or more confident overall than good performers, as cognitive performance and metacognitive bias did not correlate significantly (rs = .11). These findings allow us to move beyond consideration of group-level insight and inform regarding individual differences in cognitive and metacognitive abilities.

Face matching and metacognition: investigating individual differences and a training intervention

Background

Although researchers have begun to consider metacognitive insight during face matching, little is known about the underlying mechanism. Here, I investigated whether objective ability, as well as self-assessed ability, were able to predict metacognitive performance, that is, the ability to differentiate correct and incorrect responses in terms of confidence. In addition, I considered whether a training intervention resulted in improvements to both face matching performance and metacognitive insight.

Methods

In this experiment (N = 220), participants completed a face matching task, with either a diagnostic feature training course or a control course presented at the halfway point. In addition, a second face matching task, as well as a self-report questionnaire regarding ability, were completed to provide measures of objective and self-assessed ability respectively.

Results

Higher self-assessed ability with faces, as well as higher objective ability with face matching, predicted better metacognitive performance, i.e., greater confidence in correct, in comparison with incorrect, responses. This pattern of results was evident both when objective ability was measured through performance on the same task used to measure metacognitive insight and when a different task was used. Finally, the training intervention failed to produce improvements in face matching performance and showed no evidence of altering metacognitive ability.

Discussion

The current work begins to address the mechanism underlying individual differences in metacognitive insight during face matching. Although support was provided for a competence-based account, where better face matchers showed greater performance on the task and were more successful in monitoring their performance, further work might focus on decoupling task performance and competence in order to more conclusively explain why some people are more insightful than others.

Tracking Missing Person in Large Crowd Gathering Using Intelligent Video Surveillance

Locating a missing child or elderly person in a large gathering through face recognition in videos is still challenging because of various dynamic factors. In this paper, we present an intelligent mechanism for tracking missing persons in an unconstrained large gathering scenario of Al-Nabawi Mosque, Madinah, KSA. The proposed mechanism in this paper is unique in two aspects. First, there are various proposals existing in the literature that deal with face detection and recognition in high-quality images of a large crowd but none of them tested tracking of a missing person in low resolution images of a large gathering scenario. Secondly, our proposed mechanism is unique in the sense that it employs four phases: (a) report missing person online through web and mobile app based on spatio-temporal features; (b) geo fence set estimation for reducing search space; (c) face detection using the fusion of Viola Jones cascades LBP, CART, and HAAR to optimize the results of the localization of face regions; and (d) face recognition to find a missing person based on the profile image of reported missing person. The overall results of our proposed intelligent tracking mechanism suggest good performance when tested on a challenging dataset of 2208 low resolution images of large crowd gathering.

Metacognition during unfamiliar face matching

Kruger and Dunning (1999) described a metacognitive bias in which insight into performance is linked to competence: poorer performers are less aware of their mistakes than better performers. Competence-based insight has been argued to apply generally across task domains, including a recent report investigating social cognition using a variety of face-matching tasks. Problematically, serious statistical and methodological criticisms have been directed against the traditional method of analysis used by researchers in this field. Here, we further illustrate these issues and investigate new sources of insight within unfamiliar face matching. Over two experiments (total N = 1077), where Experiment 2 was a preregistered replication of the key findings from Experiment 1, we found that insight into performance was multi-faceted. Participants demonstrated insight which was not based on competence, in the form of accurate updating of estimated performance. We also found evidence of insight which was based on competence: the difference in confidence on correct versus incorrect trials increased with competence. By providing ways that we can move beyond problematic, traditional approaches, we have begun to reveal a more realistic story regarding the nature of insight into face perception.

Visual search performance in 'CCTV' and mobile phone-like video footage

Finding an unfamiliar person in a crowd of others is an integral task for police officers, CCTV-operators, and security staff who may be looking for a suspect or missing person; however, research suggests that it is difficult and accuracy in such tasks is low. In two real-world visual-search experiments, we examined whether being provided with four images versus one image of an unfamiliar target person would help improve accuracy when searching for that person through video footage. In Experiment 1, videos were taken from above and at a distance to simulate CCTV, and images of the target showed their face and torso. In Experiment 2, videos were taken from approximately shoulder height, such as one would expect from body-camera or mobile phone recordings, and target images included only the face. Our findings suggest that having four images as exemplars leads to higher accuracy in the visual search tasks, but this only reached significance in Experiment 2. There also appears to be a conservative bias whereby participants are more likely to respond that the target is not in the video when presented with only one image as opposed to 4. These results point to there being an advantage for providing multiple images of targets for use in video visual-search.

Face processing in police service: the relationship between laboratory-based assessment of face processing abilities and performance in a real-world identity matching task

In the present study, we investigated whether police officers’ performance in searching for unfamiliar faces in a video-based real-world task is predicted by laboratory-based face processing tests that are typically used to assess individual differences in face processing abilities. Specifically, perceptual performance in the field was operationalized via the identification of target individuals in self-made close-circuit television (CCTV) video tapes. Police officers’ abilities in the laboratory were measured by the Cambridge Face Memory Test long form (CFMT+). We hypothesized that the CFMT+ predicts individual differences in the CCTV task performance. A total of N = 186 police officers of the Rhineland-Palatinate State Police participated in the study (i.e., N = 139 novice and advanced cadets with either 3 months, 15 months or 24 months of pre-service experience; N = 47 experienced police officers with three years of pre-service experience and at least two years of full-service experience, who participated in the assessment center of the special police forces, specifically the surveillance and technical unit). Results revealed that the CFMT+ explained variance in the CCTV task. In sample 1, CFMT+ scores predicted hits, but not false alarms. In contrast, in sample 2, CFMT+ scores were correlated with both hits and false alarms. From a theoretical perspective, we discuss factors that might explain CCTV task performance. From a practical perspective, we recommend that personnel selection processes investigating individual differences of police officers’ face processing abilities should comprise of two steps. At first, laboratory-based tests of face processing abilities should be applied. Subsequently, to validate laboratory-based individual differences in face processing abilities, we recommend that work samples such as CCTV tasks from the field should be added.

Forgetting faces over a week: investigating self-reported face recognition ability and personality

Background

Although face recognition is now well studied, few researchers have considered the nature of forgetting over longer time periods. Here, I investigated how newly learned faces were recognised over the course of one week. In addition, I considered whether self-reported face recognition ability, as well as Big Five personality dimensions, were able to predict actual performance in a recognition task.

Methods

In this experiment (N = 570), faces were learned through short video interviews, and these identities were later presented in a recognition test (using previously unseen images) after no delay, six hours, twelve hours, one day, or seven days.

Results

The majority of forgetting took place within the first 24 hours, with no significant decrease after that timepoint. Further, self-reported face recognition abilities were moderately predictive of performance, while extraversion showed a small, negative association with performance. In both cases, these associations remained consistent across delay conditions.

Discussion

The current work begins to address important questions regarding face recognition using longitudinal, real-world time intervals, focussing on participant insight into their own abilities, and the process of forgetting more generally.

Multiple-image arrays in face matching tasks with and without memory

Previous research has shown that exposure to within-person variability facilitates face learning. A different body of work has examined potential benefits of providing multiple images in face matching tasks. Viewers are asked to judge whether a target face matches a single face image (as when checking photo-ID) or multiple face images of the same person. The evidence here is less clear, with some studies finding a small multiple-image benefit, and others finding no advantage. In four experiments, we address this discrepancy in the benefits of multiple images from learning and matching studies. We show that multiple-image arrays only facilitate face matching when arrays precede targets. Unlike simultaneous face matching tasks, sequential matching and learning tasks involve memory and require abstraction of a stable representation of the face from the array, for subsequent comparison with a target. Our results show that benefits from multiple-image arrays occur only when this abstraction is required, and not when array and target images are available at once. These studies reconcile apparent differences between face learning and face matching and provide a theoretical framework for the study of within-person variability in face perception.