“There are real problems with photo IDs.”— RICHARD RUSSELL
When one face looks like a crowd
Multiple photos of a stranger’s mug ID’d as different people
deck of 40 photos. Twenty different
images of each of two Dutch celebrities
appeared on the cards. Volunteers had
never seen the foreign celebrities.
By Bruce Bower
For an instant “identity crisis,” just
peruse some photographs of a stranger’s
face. In many instances, people view different mug shots of the same unfamiliar
person as entirely different individuals, say psychologist Rob Jenkins of the
University of Glasgow in Scotland and
his colleagues.
Previous research has found that volunteers often can’t match the face of a
stranger standing in front of them to that
person’s image on an ID card. Other evidence suggests that digitally combining
several photos of the same person taken
under different conditions improves
performance on this matching task.
When asked to sort photos by identity, participants created anywhere from
three to 16 piles. Students most often
discerned nine individuals in the two
women’s photos.
Dutch volunteers usually sorted
photos of the two women, whom they
recognized, into two piles.
Yet photos of a celebrity or other
recognizable person retain a uniform
identity despite changes in lighting,
facial expression and other factors across
images, the scientists report online
September 3 in Cognition.
“There are real problems with photo
IDs,” says psychologist Richard Russell
of Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania.
Jenkins’ new study underscores a
deep, poorly understood divide between
familiar and unfamiliar face recognition,
says psychologist Bradley Duchaine of
Dartmouth College. Russell theorizes
that face familiarity partly requires
learning to recognize an individual’s
physical properties that stay constant
under different conditions.
Jenkins and his colleagues gave
20 British college students a shuffled
Another experiment found that,
among British students shown a dozen
face photos of each of 40 familiar
British celebrities, some images were
considered much better physical likenesses than others. A greater number of
face photos of particularly well-known
celebrities were rated as good likenesses,
supporting the idea that familiarity
with someone’s face breeds tolerance
to facial variability.
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