Time Pressure and Human-Computer Interaction in Face Matching

Research has consistently demonstrated that the matching of unfamiliar faces is remarkably error-prone. This raises concerns surrounding the reliability of this task in operational settings, such as passport control, to verify a person's identity. A large proportion of the research investigating face matching has done so whilst employing highly optimised same-day face photographs. Conversely, such ideal conditions are unlikely to arise in realistic contexts, thus making it difficult to estimate accuracy in these settings from current research. To attempt to address this limitation, the experiments in this thesis aimed to explore performance in forensic face matching under a range of conditions that were intended to more closely approximate those at passport control. This was achieved by developing a new test of face matching - the Kent Face Matching Test (KFMT) - in which to-be-matched stimuli were photographed months apart (Chapter 2). The more challenging conditions provided by the KFMT were then utilised throughout the subsequent experiments reported, to investigate the impact of time pressure on task performance (Chapter 3), as well as the reliability of human-computer interaction at passport control (Chapter 4). The results of these experiments indicate that person identification at passport control is substantially more challenging than is currently estimated by studies that employ highly optimised face-pair stimuli. This was particularly evident on identity mismatch trials, for which accuracy deteriorated consistently within sessions, due to a match response bias that emerged over time (Chapters 2 & 3). These results are discussed within the context of passport control, and suggestions are provided for future research to further reveal why errors might arise in this task.