Body Language Influences on Facial Identification at Passport Control: An Exploration in Virtual Reality

Queues, crowds, and angry mobs: Face identification under distraction in a virtual airport

In visual environments, selective attention must be employed to focus on task-relevant stimuli. A key question here concerns the extent to which other stimuli within the visual field influence target processing. In this study, we ask whether face identity matching is subject to similar effects from irrelevant stimuli in the visual field, specifically task-irrelevant people. Although most previous studies rely on highly controlled face and body stimuli presented in isolation, here we use a more realistic environment. Participants take the role of passport officers and must match a person's face to their photo-ID, while other people appear in the background, waiting to be processed. Presenting an interactive virtual environment on screen (Experiments 1 and 2) or in immersive VR (Experiment 3), we generally found no evidence for distraction from background people on face-matching accuracy. However, when immersed in VR, an angry crowd in the background delayed matching speed while not affecting accuracy. We discuss the theoretical implications of these results and their potential importance in practical settings.

Avatars with faces of real people: A construction method for scientific experiments in virtual reality

Experimental psychology research typically employs methods that greatly simplify the real-world conditions within which cognition occurs. This approach has been successful for isolating cognitive processes, but cannot adequately capture how perception operates in complex environments. In turn, real-world environments rarely afford the access and control required for rigorous scientific experimentation. In recent years, technology has advanced to provide a solution to these problems, through the development of affordable high-capability virtual reality (VR) equipment. The application of VR is now increasing rapidly in psychology, but the realism of its avatars, and the extent to which they visually represent real people, is captured poorly in current VR experiments. Here, we demonstrate a user-friendly method for creating photo-realistic avatars of real people and provide a series of studies to demonstrate their psychological characteristics. We show that avatar faces of familiar people are recognised with high accuracy (Study 1), replicate the familiarity advantage typically observed in real-world face matching (Study 2), and show that these avatars produce a similarity-space that corresponds closely with real photographs of the same faces (Study 3). These studies open the way to conducting psychological experiments on visual perception and social cognition with increased realism in VR.

Low prevalence match and mismatch detection in simultaneous face matching: Influence of face recognition ability and feature focus guidance

Simultaneous face matching to verify identity is key to security and policing. However, matching is error-prone, particularly when target-item prevalence is low. Two experiments examined whether superior face recognition ability and the use of internal or external facial feature guidance scales would reduce low prevalence effects. In Experiment 1, super-recognisers (n = 317) significantly outperformed typical-ability controls (n = 452), while internal feature guidance enhanced accuracy across all prevalence conditions. However, an unexpected effect in controls revealed higher accuracy in low prevalence conditions, probably because no low-match or low-mismatch prevalence information was provided. In Experiment 2, top-end-of-typical range ability participants (n = 841) were informed of their low prevalence condition and demonstrated the expected low-prevalence effects. Findings and implications are discussed.