Face identification within realistic contexts

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In many situations, security relies on accurate person identification. At airports, routine person identifications are based on face matching, in which passport officers have to decide whether the face photograph in a presented identity document actually depicts its bearer. People seeking to avoid detection at such security controls may attempt to use illicit ID. Passports themselves are now highly sophisticated documents, which are difficult to forge. For this reason, fraudsters typically use valid identity documents, often belonging to someone with a similar facial appearance. A substantial body of laboratory research now exists to demonstrate that the detection of such impostors - or identity mismatches - is difficult and highly error-prone, even by trained professionals.However, all existing research has investigated face matching under fairly basic experimental conditions, often presenting pairs of cropped faces on plain backgrounds, or in highly simplified field settings. There is some value in these lab-based studies, because they allow one to study such important variables as individual differences, image quality and so forth. However, these approaches offer a weak proxy for studying how the environment and social interaction affect this task, which provide many additional factors that can affect face matching. For example, passport officers may resort to information from body language to support identification decisions, but environmental factors such as queues and crowd dynamics might also exert pressure on passport officers that could compromise their performance. The impact of such factors is likely to be very large, as suggested by research on human performance in other realistic settings. However, the sensitive and security-critical nature of passport control makes it practically impossible to study in real life. In this project, we propose a novel approach to investigate these factors, by examining face matching in virtual reality (VR), which can provide the detailed interactive environments that conventional laboratory experiments cannot. This approach is completely new in face matching and allows for the study of factors that may affect person identification in the real world but cannot be captured by laboratory experiments.We propose a series of three validation experiments to establish that a virtual environment captures the key visual aspects required for person identification. This is followed by eleven main experiments which will test how environmental and social interaction factors affect forensic person identification in a realistic context. These experiments will examine the impact of factors such as a person's body language, passenger queues, and crowd dynamics. The knowledge gained from these experiments will considerably advance our theoretical understanding of face matching, which currently cannot accommodate the important effects of environmental and social interaction factors on this task. The project will also yield findings of applied importance, for example, in terms of understanding how security in person identification could be enhanced at airports.In addition, the project will produce a free database of avatars for psychological research on person identification in VR, as well as an open access start-up guide for other researchers with an interest in conducting such research. These resources will create a lasting impact on the development of VR research in Psychology beyond the scope of this project.