Facial Identification

According to “The Science Behind Eyewitness Identification Reform” there are two main variables that affect eyewitness testimonies “Estimator variables: are those that cannot be controlled by the criminal justice system. They include simple factors like the lighting when the crime took place or the distance from which the witness saw the perpetrator, and the degree of stress or trauma a witness experienced while seeing the perpetrator” and “System variables: are those that the criminal justice system can and should control. They include all of the ways that law enforcement agencies retrieve and record witness memory, such as lineups, photo arrays, and other identification procedures”. Eyewitness misidentification has led to 75% of false convictions that were overruled by modern DNA testing according to “The Innocence

One of the processes thought to contribute to human face perception, the human visual system integrates facial features into a gestalt whole (referred to as holistic face processing). [1]. Research indicates that face components (e.g., the eyes, nose, and mouth) are recognized better as belonging to a certain face when they were shown within the context of the whole (upright) face than when they were shown alone. However in terms of race, the other-race effect (ORE) is a well-documented recognition advantage for same-race (SR) over other-race (OR) face and has been demonstrated in line up identification, photo line ups and eye witness testimonies [2]. FFA is less active in response to OR faces than SR

In adults, three variables were used to test the other-race effect on facial recognition: orientation, face type and ethnicity. Adults at least 18 years of age and older (N = 64) were asked to recognize upright and inverted adult and infant faces. Recognition was tested using a forced-choice procedure. 4 slides were shown during a trial to make sure participants understood the instructions. Next, participants viewed 48 slides with faces alternating between adult female and infant faces; first segment each face was upright, second segment faces were inverted. The results of the study found that there was no significance between race and facial recognition. Other research conducted has shown that race does in fact have a significant effect on facial recognition.

There are many different factors that play a part in the increased chance of a witness correctly identifying a suspect. Such factors should be brought to the attention of the jury and the judge to help in properly assessing whether a witness is correctly identifying a suspect. A study by Magnussen, Melinder, Stridbeck, & Raja (2010) found that of the three different types of people: judge, jury, and general public, that for the most part all where fairly ill-informed on the reliability of eyewitness testimony with judges having the most. Judges only had about an 8% difference in knowledge when compared to jurors. With this information it is very clear that education on the reliability of eyewitness testimony needs to become more of a general knowledge information for the everyone, especially people who are involved in upholding the law. Another factor to look into when evaluating the accuracy eyewitness testimony is the role that memory plays. Memory is divided into three processes: perceiving, remembering, and recalling information (Simmonsen, 2013). There is plenty of room in all three of those stages to forget or falsely remember something. Some factors that play a part when a person perceives an event is the amount of time they are exposed to the event and the suspect. A study conducted by Horry, Halford, Brewer, Milne, & Bull. (2014) found that witnesses were increasingly more likely to correctly identify a suspect if they had been exposed to the suspect for sixty

Eyewitness Memory for a Simulated Misdemeanor Crime: The Role of Age and Temperament in Suggestibility

The researchers used 11 Polaroid photos of VJ’s club members to teach the face-name associations. This was performed by the method of combining visual imagery, vanishing cues, and expanding rehearsal (Clare et al., 2001). The researchers took VJ to the familiar environment of the club to do generalisation sessions using the photos and found the initial recall was 20% and raised to 98% over time and became 100% at the one, three, six and nine months follow-up

The studies conducted by Northwestern say that brain activity increases in the first 200 milliseconds when we first interact with a person from our same race or from a different race. The studies say that there is a time right after a person meets another of the same race or a different race that determines whether the face is remembered or even forgotten. The point where the brain begins to remember or forget the memory is almost immediately after a person first sees the face. People also remember people by their attributes for example, you might see that a face reminds you of someone you know. You may see that the persons expression appears kind or afraid, or it looks like the face of a famous athlete or a singer. Being able to identify people's attributes increases the likelihood that a face will be

Participants were shown each of the cards (a) to (d) in set 2, in order, for three seconds each. Participants were then asked to write down what they saw in each of the pictures, but their responses are not recorded by the experimenter. The purpose of this was to develop a perceptual set for faces based on the participant’s immediate past experience with the four pictures of faces.

Processing faces is extremely important to humans as social beings. We are able to put and identity on thousands of faces (Gazzaniga, 2002) with ease, something we might take for granted. The value of this ability can be better understood when the world is viewed through the eyes of somebody with prosopagnosia, the inability to recognise faces. The following quotation from David Fine, a prosopagnosic describing the difficulty associated with the disorder.

After being shown an image of one of twelve standardized faces, half of black boys, half of white boy, they were asked to determine whether the next image was of a weapon or toy, followed by a pattern mask to block visual processing of the previous image (Todd, et al., 2016). Todd et al (2016) measured reaction time (RT), which were measured in milliseconds (ms) and error rate or how often an object was identified incorrectly. Following the identification task the participants rated the age, race-ethnicity, and how threatening the image was for each of the 12 images. (Todd, et al.,

“Violence, stress, and the presence of a weapon at the time of a crime all may have detrimental effects on the ability of a witness to make an accurate identification” (Vallas, 2011). Stress distorts an eyewitness’s observations, and while it is understandable to focus on the weapon when faced with a situation in which the eyewitness is in danger, the focus on the weapon is not as important as the description of the perpetrator. Since it is not within the power of researchers studying the effects of violence and stress on witnesses to replicate the exact stress and violence of an actual crime, it has been difficult to determine the actual effect that these two factors have on witnesses (Vallas, 2011). However, many experiments conclude that an increase in the level of violence used in the crime results in a decrease in both the accuracy of the identification as well as the witness’s recall abilities (Vallas, 2011). Weapon focus is described as

Prosopagnosia is a condition where a person cannot recognise familiar faces, but only the features, not the whole face. The condition contradicts the model as it suggests that the process are most likely not separate. As most patients had severe problems with facial expression as well as facial identity, this suggests they are processed separately. The model can also be seen as reductionist, as it only gives a vague description of what the cognitive system does. However, there is research that does support the concept that there are two are separate paths for processing face recognition and facial expression. One being Humphreys, Avidan, and Behrmann (2007) who studied three participants with developmental prosopagnosia. All three had poor ability to recognise faces, but their ability to recognise facial expressions was similar to that of healthy

Much of the research in this area has focused on how race affects observers’ recognition or memory of others. Although people are generally quite adept at recognizing the faces of others who they have seen previously, doing so is considerably more difficult for faces of other-race individuals. This tendency has been called the own-race bias. Regardless of whether a particular individual is recognized or not, perceiving a target’s race permits racial stereotypes to affect a broad range of social perceptions and judgments, even in the absence of explicit prejudice. In some laboratory studies, for example, participants have been asked to make simple judgments—such as whether a target is holding a gun or a tool—that are objectively unrelated to the target’s race. In other studies, participants have been charged with deciding whether or not to “pull the trigger” on a target who is holding either a weapon or another object. In both cases, the race of the target affects the speed and accuracy of judgments (Sadalla et al, 1994). The facility to perceive others accurately from visual cues alone extends beyond the perception of sex and race. Based on only brief exposures to degraded video images of an individual, observers can accurately judge a range of personal characteristics. These include social categories such as sex, race, and sexual orientation and dispositional characteristics such as teaching effectiveness. Thus, even from these thin slices, person perception can be remarkably accurate (Ambady, 1992). Whether person perception occurs by inferring traits from behaviors or by merely perceiving the physical appearance of another, this is the foundation for how people respond to and evaluate others. Given this far-reaching impact, research investigating various aspects of person perception will continue to be an important area in social psychology for years to

Recognizing distortions of a human face can be caused by early visual experience (Maurer, Grand & Mondloch, 2001). Looking at a countless number of people’s faces at a young age impacts greatly on how young children detect what a face is supposed to look like and to recognize a person, such as a family member. However, it is not just early visual experience that impacts facial recognition, there is a lot of behavior evidence that proves that facial configuration is important for recognition as well as computational investigations. Computational investigations are ambiguous to the fact that second-order relation contains characteristic information. They indicate that configural information is a key aspect of the facial identification signature and can be dispensed with, with minimum loss of performance (Balas & Sinha, 2007). This research is very important because it helps everyone figure out whether configural processing is unique to faces. My hypothesis is that the inverted faces are hard for people to pinpoint what the picture is and that children are not as good at face configuration as adults

To human beings, facial recognition is not only essential for identification of persons in the social context, but also a vital social tool. There are various reasons why facial recognition process is a vital to human beings. Facial recognition serves an essential purpose of identifying members within our society; as a result, we are able to select those that we can socialize with that aid our survival in society. For instance, the males are able to select or identify the female and establish relationship that results to continuity of generation (Matsuo, Nakai, 1998, p. 110). While strong relationship and bonding exhibited in mother to child are facilitated by the facial recognition