Human-computer interaction in face matching

Automatic facial recognition is becoming increasingly ubiquitous in security contexts such as passport control. Currently, Automated Border Crossing (ABC) systems in the United Kingdom (UK) and the European Union (EU) require supervision from a human operator who validates correct identity judgements and overrules incorrect decisions. As the accuracy of this human-computer interaction is unknown, this research investigated how human validation is impacted by a priori face-matching decisions such as those made by automated face recognition software. Observers matched pairs of faces that were already labelled onscreen as depicting the same identity or two different identities. The majority of these labels provided information that was consistent with the stimuli presented, but some were also inconsistent or provided ‘unresolved’ information. Across three experiments, accuracy consistently deteriorated on trials that were inconsistently labelled, indicating that observers’ face-matching decisions are biased by external information such as that provided by ABCs.