ArticleScientific reports2023
Diverse types of expertise in facial recognition.
Article in Scientific reports, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Too good to be true: Synthetic AI faces are more average than real faces and super-recognizers know it.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2026Article
- Hair vs. fabric: substrate-dependent microbiome shifts dictate the accuracy of forensic body-fluid identification.International journal of legal medicine · 2026Article
- Article
- The state of modelling face processing in humans with deep learning.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2026Review
- Do evaluative statements in facial identification overstate the strength of the evidence?Journal of forensic sciences · 2026Article
- Understanding the influence of design-related factors on human-AI teaming in a face matching task.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2026Article
- Training human super-recognizers' detection and discrimination of AI-generated faces.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Super-recognizers sample visual information of superior computational value for facial recognition.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Cognitive Bias Affects Perception and Decision-Making in Simulated Facial Recognition Searches.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Information sampling differences supporting superior face identity processing ability.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Normative face recognition ability test scores vary across online participant pools.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Jack of all trades, master of one: domain-specific and domain-general contributions to perceptual expertise in visual comparison.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2024Article
- Let's talk about faces: Identifying faces from verbal descriptions.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2023Article
- Perceptual Expertise of Forensic Examiners and Reviewers on Tests of Cross-Race and Disguised Face Identification and Face Memory.Applied cognitive psychologyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Facial recognition errors can jeopardize national security, criminal justice, public safety and civil rights. Here, we compare the most accurate humans and facial recognition technology in a detailed lab-based evaluation and international proficiency test for forensic scientists involving 27 forensic departments from 14 countries. We find striking cognitive and perceptual diversity between naturally skilled super-recognizers, trained forensic examiners and deep neural networks, despite them achieving equivalent accuracy. Clear differences emerged in super-recognizers' and forensic examiners' perceptual processing, errors, and response patterns: super-recognizers were fast, biased to respond 'same person' and misidentified people with extreme confidence, whereas forensic examiners were slow, unbiased and strategically avoided misidentification errors. Further, these human experts and deep neural networks disagreed on the similarity of faces, pointing to differences in their representations of faces. Our findings therefore reveal multiple types of facial recognition expertise, with each type lending itself to particular facial recognition roles in operational settings. Finally, we show that harnessing the diversity between individual experts provides a robust method of maximizing facial recognition accuracy. This can be achieved either via collaboration between experts in forensic laboratories, or most promisingly, by statistical fusion of match scores provided by different types of expert.
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