A. Mike Burton

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor at University of York

Theoretical understanding of first impressions from faces has been closely associated with the proposal that rapid approach–avoidance decisions are needed during social interactions. Nevertheless, experimental work has rarely examined first impressions of people who are actually moving—instead extrapolating from photographic images. In six experime...

Provoked overt recognition refers to the fact that patients with acquired prosopagnosia can sometimes recognize faces when presented in arrays of individuals from the same category (e.g., actors or politicians). We ask whether a prosopagnosic patient might experience recognition when presented with multiple different images of the same face simulta...

While face, object, and scene recognition are often studied at a basic categorization level (e.g. "a face", "a car", "a kitchen"), we frequently recognise individual items of these categories as unique entities (e.g. "my mother", "my car", "my kitchen"). This recognition of individual identity is essential to appropriate behaviour in our world. How...

In visual environments, selective attention must be employed to focus on task-relevant stimuli. A key question here concerns the extent to which other stimuli within the visual field influence target processing. In this study we ask whether face identity matching is subject to similar effects from irrelevant stimuli in the visual field, specificall...

Provoked overt recognition refers to the fact that patients with acquired prosopagnosia can sometimes recognise faces when presented with arrays of individuals from the same category (e.g. actors or politicians). Here we ask whether a prosopagnosic patient might experience recognition when presented with multiple different images of the same famous...

A key challenge in human and computer face recognition is to differentiate information that is diagnostic for identity from other sources of image variation. Here, we used a combined computational and behavioural approach to reveal critical image dimensions for face recognition. Behavioural data were collected using a sorting and matching task with...

Memory is essential for everyday life. The understanding and study of memory has continued to grow over the years, thanks to well controlled laboratory studies and theory development. However, major challenges arise when attempting to apply theories of memory function to practical problems in society. A theory might be robust in explaining experime...

Memory is essential for everyday life. The understanding and study of memory has continued to grow over the years, thanks to well controlled laboratory studies and theory development. However, major challenges arise when attempting to apply theories of memory function to practical problems in society. A theory might be robust in explaining experime...

What constitutes a 'threatening tone of voice'? There is currently little research exploring how listeners infer threat, or the intention to cause harm, from speakers' voices. Here, we investigated the influence of key linguistic variables on these evaluations (Study 1). Results showed a trend for voices perceived to be lower in pitch, particularly...

Recognizing a face as belonging to a given identity is essential in our everyday life. Clearly, the correct identification of a face is only possible for familiar people, but 'familiarity' covers a wide range-from people we see every day to those we barely know. Although several studies have shown that the processing of familiar and unfamiliar face...

Recognizing a face as familiar is essential in our everyday life. However, ‘familiarity’ covers a wide range – from people we see every day to those we barely know. Although face recognition is studied extensively, little is known about how the degree of familiarity affects neural face processing, despite the critical social importance of this dime...

Making new acquaintances requires learning to recognise previously unfamiliar faces. In the current study, we investigated this process by staging real-world social interactions between actors and the participants. Participants completed a face-matching behavioural task in which they matched photographs of the actors (whom they had yet to meet), or...

Face perception is crucial to social interactions, yet people vary in how easily they can recognize their friends, verify an identification document or notice someone’s smile. There are widespread differences in people’s ability to recognize faces, and research has particularly focused on exceptionally good or poor recognition performance. In this...

Humans excel in familiar face recognition, but often find it hard to make identity judgements of unfamiliar faces. Understanding of the factors underlying the substantial benefits of familiarity is at present limited, but the effect is sometimes qualified by the way in which a face is known – for example, personal acquaintance sometimes gives rise...

General Audience Summary Psychological experiments into human cognition either tend to study behaviour in the laboratory, where the conditions under which research is conducted are simplistic but tightly controlled or relinquish such control in field studies, where behaviour is examined in natural environments in which additional factors can be at...

Human observers recognize the faces of people they know efficiently and without apparent effort. Consequently, recognizing a familiar face is often assumed to be an automatic process beyond voluntary control. However, there are circumstances in which a person might seek to hide their recognition of a particular face. The present study therefore use...

Experimental psychology research typically employs methods that greatly simplify the real-world conditions within which cognition occurs. This approach has been successful for isolating cognitive processes, but cannot adequately capture how perception operates in complex environments. In turn, real-world environments rarely afford the access and co...

We present an expanded version of a widely used measure of unfamiliar face matching ability, the Glasgow Face Matching Test (GFMT). The GFMT2 is created using the same source database as the original test but makes five key improvements. First, the test items include variation in head angle, pose, expression and subject-to-camera distance, making t...

Previous research has shown that exposure to within-person variability facilitates face learning. A different body of work has examined potential benefits of providing multiple images in face matching tasks. Viewers are asked to judge whether a target face matches a single face image (as when checking photo-ID) or multiple face images of the same p...

One of the best-known phenomena in face recognition is the other-race effect, the observation that own-race faces are better remembered than other-race faces. However, previous studies have not put the magnitude of other-race effect in the context of other influences on face recognition. Here, we compared the effects of (a) a race manipulation (own...

Matching unfamiliar faces is a well-studied task, apparently capturing important everyday decisions such as ID checks. In typical lab studies participants make same/different judgements to pairs of faces, presented in isolation and without context. However, it has recently become clear that matching faces embedded in documents (e.g. passports and d...

We present an expanded version of a widely used measure of unfamiliar face matching ability, the Glasgow Face Matching Test (GFMT). The GFMT2 is created using the same source database as the original test but makes five key improvements. First, the test items include variation in head angle, pose, expression and subject-to-camera distance, making t...

Human faces and voices are rich sources of information that can vary in many different ways. Most of the literature on face/voice perception has focused on understanding how people look and sound different to each other (between-person variability). However, recent studies highlight the ways in which the same person can look and sound different on...

The visual comparison of unfamiliar faces—or ‘face matching’—is utilized widely for person identification in applied settings and has generated substantial research interest in psychology, but a cognitive theory to explain how observers perform this task does not exist. This chapter outlines issues of importance to support the development of a cogn...

Person identification at passport control, at borders, in police investigations, and in criminal trials relies critically on the identity verification of people via image-to-image or person-to-image comparison. While this task is known as ‘facial image comparison’ in forensic settings, it has been studied as ‘unfamiliar face matching’ in cognitive...

Human faces and voices are rich sources of information that can vary in many different ways. Most of the literature on face/voice perception has focussed on understanding how people look and sound different to each other (between-person variability). However, recent studies highlight the ways in which the same person can look and sound different on...

Matching unfamiliar faces is highly error‐prone, and most studies highlight the implications for real‐world ID‐checking. Here we study a particular instance of ID‐checking: proof of age for buying restricted goods such as alcohol. In this case, checkers must establish that an identity document is carried by its legitimate owner (i.e., that the ID p...

We agree with Blauch, Behrmann, and Plaut (2020) on a number of points, and are reassured that their data bear out our previous findings. We discuss differences in modelling style, and the usefulness of different types of model for supporting psychological understanding. We emphasise the role that within-person variability plays in recognising fami...

The human face and voice are rich sources of information that can vary in many different ways. Most of the literature on face/voice perception has focussed on understanding how people look and sound different to each other (between-person variability). However, recent studies highlight the ways in which the same person can look and sound different...

Hyper-realistic face masks have been used as disguises in at least one border crossing and in numerous criminal cases. Experimental tests using these masks have shown that viewers accept them as real faces under a range of conditions. Here, we tested mask detection in a live identity verification task. Fifty-four visitors at the London Science Muse...

We can recognise people that we know across their lifespan. We see family members age, and we can recognise celebrities across long careers. How is this possible, despite the very large facial changes that occur as people get older? Here we analyse the statistical properties of faces as they age, sampling photos of the same people from their 20s to...

Unfamiliar face matching is a difficult task. In typical experiments, viewers see isolated face pairs and have to decide whether they show the same or different people. Recent research shows that embedding faces into passports introduces a response bias, such that viewers are more likely to accept two pictures as showing the same person. Here, we i...

Making new acquaintances necessitates learning to recognise previously unfamiliar faces. In the current study, we investigated this process by staging real-world social interactions between actors and the participants. Participants (N=22) completed a face-matching behavioural task in which they matched photographs of the actors (whom they had yet t...

Background: We present a series of experiments on visual search in a highly complex environment, security closed-circuit television (CCTV). Using real surveillance footage from a large city transport hub, we ask viewers to search for target individuals. Search targets are presented in a number of ways, using naturally occurring images including th...

First impressions formed after seeing someone’s face or hearing their voice can affect many social decisions, including voting in political elections. Despite the many studies investigating the independent contribution of face and voice cues to electoral success, their integration is still not well understood. Here, we examine a novel electoral con...

In everyday life we usually recognise personally familiar faces efficiently and without apparent effort. This study examined to which extent the neural processes involved in recognising personally familiar faces depend on attentional resources by analysing event-related brain potentials. In two experiments, participants were presented with multiple...

A paradoxical finding from recent studies of face perception is that observers are error-prone and inconsistent when judging the identity of unfamiliar faces, but nevertheless reasonably consistent when judging traits. Our aim is to understand this difference. Using everyday ambient images of faces, we show that visual image statistics can predict...

Models of social evaluation aim to capture the information people use to form first impressions of unfamiliar others. However, little is currently known about the relationship between perceived traits across gender. In Study 1, we asked viewers to provide ratings of key social dimensions (dominance, trustworthiness etc.) for multiple images of 40 u...

Facial image comparison practitioners compare images of unfamiliar faces and decide whether or not they show the same person. Given the importance of these decisions for national security and criminal investigations, practitioners attend training courses to improve their face identification ability. However, these courses have not been empirically...

FISWG training guidelines (v1.1 2010.11.18). (PDF)

Training course content review table. (XLSX)

Supplementary analyses and task details. (DOCX)

Training course evaluation data. (XLSX)

Humans are remarkably accurate at recognizing familiar faces, whereas their ability to recognize, or even match, unfamiliar faces is much poorer. However, previous research has failed to identify neural correlates of this striking behavioral difference. Here, we found a clear difference in brain potentials elicited by highly familiar faces versus u...

Forgetting someone's name is a common failure of memory, and often occurs despite being able to recognise that person's face. This gives rise to the widespread view that memory for names is generally worse than memory for faces. However, this everyday error confounds stimulus class (faces vs. names) with memory task: recognition versus recall. Here...

Over our species history, humans have typically lived in small groups of under a hundred individuals. However, our face recognition abilities appear to equip us to recognize very many individuals, perhaps thousands. Modern society provides access to huge numbers of faces, but no one has established how many faces people actually know. Here, we desc...

Low‐quality images are problematic for face identification, for example, when the police identify faces from CCTV images. Here, we test whether face averages, comprising multiple poor‐quality images, can improve both human and computer recognition. We created averages from multiple pixelated or nonpixelated images and compared accuracy using these...

We investigated the relationships between individual differences in different aspects of face-identity processing, using the Glasgow Face Matching Test (GFMT) as a measure of unfamiliar face perception, the Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT) as a measure of new face learning, and the Before They Were Famous task (BTWF) as a measure of familiar face...

Human voices are extremely variable: The same person can sound very different depending on whether they are speaking, laughing, shouting or whispering. In order to successfully recognise someone from their voice, a listener needs to be able to generalize across these different vocal signals ('telling people together'). However, in most studies of v...

Unfamiliar face matching is a surprisingly difficult task, yet we often rely on people's matching decisions in applied settings (e.g., border control). Most attempts to improve accuracy (including training and image manipulation) have had very limited success. In a series of studies, we demonstrate that using smiling rather than neutral pairs of im...

It has been known for many years that identifying familiar faces is much easier than identifying unfamiliar faces, and that this familiar face advantage persists across a range of tasks. However, attempts to understand face familiarity have mostly used a binary contrast between 'familiar' and 'unfamiliar' faces, with no attempt to incorporate the v...

According to a widely used theoretical perspective, our everyday experiences lead us to become natural experts at perceiving and recognising human faces. However, there has been considerable debate about this view. We discuss criteria for expertise and show how the debate over face expertise has often missed key points concerning the role and natur...

The poster explores the effects of gender and familiarity on first impressions from faces. Main findings include a negative relationship between ratings of trustworthiness and dominance for female, but not male identities as well as more consistent ratings attributed to different images of the same familiar, compared to unfamiliar, identity.

Photographs of people are commonly said to be 'good likenesses' or 'poor likenesses', and this is a concept that we readily understand. Despite this, there has been no systematic investigation of what makes an image a good likeness, or of which cognitive processes are involved in making such a judgement. In three experiments, we investigate likenes...

As faces become familiar, we come to rely more on their internal features for recognition and matching tasks. Here, we assess whether this same pattern is also observed for a card sorting task. Participants sorted photos showing either the full face, only the internal features, or only the external features into multiple piles, one pile per identit...

Natural variability between instances of unfamiliar faces can make it difficult to reconcile two images as the same person. Yet for familiar faces, effortless recognition occurs even with considerable variability between images. To explore how stable face representations develop, we employed incidental learning in the form of a face sorting task. I...

We describe three experiments in which viewers complete face detection tasks as well as standard measures of unfamiliar face identification. In the first two studies, participants viewed pareidolic images of objects (Experiment 1) or cloud scenes (Experiment 2), and their propensity to see faces in these scenes was measured. In neither case is perf...

Human voices are extremely variable: The same person can sound very different depending on whether they are speaking, laughing, shouting or whispering. In order to successfully recognise someone from their voice, a listener needs to be able to generalise across these different vocal signals ('telling people together'). However, in most studies of v...

Our social evaluation of other people is influenced by their faces and their voices. However, rather little is known about how these channels combine in forming "first impressions." Over 5 experiments, we investigate the relative contributions of facial and vocal information for social judgments: dominance and trustworthiness. The experiments manip...

Matching unfamiliar faces is known to be difficult, and this can give an opportunity to those engaged in identity fraud. Here we examine a relatively new form of fraud, the use of photo-ID containing a graphical morph between two faces. Such a document may look sufficiently like two people to serve as ID for both. We present two experiments with hu...

Individual subject scores for each of the three experiments. (XLSX)

Figure permissions. (DOCX)

There is growing evidence that the occipital face area (OFA), originally thought to be involved in the construction of a low-level representation of the physical features of a face, is also taking part in higher-level face processing. To test whether the OFA is causally involved in the learning of novel face identities, we have used transcranial ma...

Viewers are highly accurate at recognizing sex and race from faces-though it remains unclear how this is achieved. Recognition of familiar faces is also highly accurate across a very large range of viewing conditions, despite the difficulty of the problem. Here we show that computation of sex and race can emerge incidentally from a system designed...

Social cues presented at visual fixation have been shown to strongly influence an observer's attention and response selection. Here we ask whether the same holds for cues (initially) presented away from fixation, as cues are commonly perceived in natural vision. In six experiments, we show that extrafoveally presented cues with a distinct outline,...

The idea that most of us are good at recognizing faces permeates everyday thinking and is widely used in the research literature. However, it is a correct characterization only of familiar-face recognition. In contrast, the perception and recognition of unfamiliar faces can be surprisingly error-prone, and this has important consequences in many re...

We describe InterFace, a software package for research in face recognition. The package supports image warping, reshaping, averaging of multiple face images, and morphing between faces. It also supports principal components analysis (PCA) of face images, along with tools for exploring the “face space” produced by PCA. The package uses a simple grap...

We describe InterFace, a software package for research in face recognition. The package supports image warping, reshaping, averaging of multiple face images, and morphing between faces. It also supports principal components analysis (PCA) of face images, along with tools for exploring the “face space” produced by PCA. The package uses a simple grap...

We learn new faces throughout life, for example in everyday settings like watching TV. Recent research has shown that image variability is key to this ability: if we learn a new face over highly variable images, we are better able to recognize that person in novel pictures. Here we asked people to watch TV shows they had not seen before, and then t...

Familiar face recognition is remarkably invariant across huge image differences, yet little is understood concerning how image-invariant recognition is achieved. To investigate the neural correlates of invariance, we localized the core face-responsive regions and then compared the pattern of fMR-adaptation to different stimulus transformations in e...

Matching unfamiliar faces is known to be a difficult task. However, most research has tested viewers' ability to match pairs of faces presented in isolation. In real settings, professionals are commonly required to examine photo ID that contains other biographical information too. In three experiments, we present faces embedded in passport frames a...

A full understanding of face recognition will involve identifying the visual information that is used to discriminate different identities and how this is represented in the brain. The aim of this study was to explore the importance of shape and surface properties in the recognition and neural representation of familiar faces. We used image morphin...

Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is commonly referred to as 'face blindness', a term that implies a perceptual basis to the condition. However, DP presents as a deficit in face recognition and is diagnosed using memory-based tasks. Here, we test face identification ability in six people with DP, who are severely impaired on face memory tasks, using...

A person’s ability to recognize familiar faces across a wide range of viewing conditions is one of the most impressive facets of human cognition. As shown in Figure 1, it is easy to conclude, for a known individual, that each image in the set shows the same person (British Prime Minister David Cameron), despite a wide range of variation in viewing...

Face recognition is used to prove identity across a wide variety of settings. Despite this, research consistently shows that people are typically rather poor at matching faces to photos. Some professional groups, such as police and passport officers, have been shown to perform just as poorly as the general public on standard tests of face recogniti...

Familiar faces are remembered better than unfamiliar faces. Furthermore, it is much easier to match images of familiar than unfamiliar faces. These findings could be accounted for by quantitative differences in the ease with which faces are encoded. However, it has been argued that there are also some qualitative differences in familiar and unfamil...

There are large behavioural differences in the perception of familiar and unfamiliar faces. However, little is known about face learning - how faces make the transition from unfamiliar to familiar. Most experimental work on this topic examines the effects of study time, and systematic variation of exposure (changes in pose etc). We have argued that...

Face recognition is a remarkable human ability, which underlies a great deal of people's social behavior. Individuals can recognize family members, friends, and acquaintances over a very large range of conditions, and yet the processes by which they do this remain poorly understood, despite decades of research. Although a detailed understanding rem...

Research on ensemble encoding has found that viewers extract summary information from sets of similar items. When shown a set of four faces of different people, viewers merge identity information from the exemplars into a representation of the set average. Here, we presented sets containing unconstrained images of the same identity. In response to...

Research in face recognition has tended to focus on discriminating between individuals, or "telling people apart." It has recently become clear that it is also necessary to understand how images of the same person can vary, or "telling people together." Learning a new face, and tracking its representation as it changes from unfamiliar to familiar,...

Our recognition of familiar faces is excellent, and generalises across viewing conditions. However, unfamiliar face recognition is much poorer. For this reason, automatic face recognition systems might benefit from incorporating the advantages of familiarity. Here we put this to the test using the face verification system available on a popular sma...

Matching unfamiliar faces is a difficult task. Here we ask whether it is possible to improve performance by providing multiple images to support matching. In two experiments we observe that accuracy improves as viewers are provided with additional images on which to base their match. This technique leads to fast learning of an individual, but the e...

Identity verification at passport control, in policing, and in retail stores is most often achieved by matching an individual's face to a photographic identity document. Despite this, recent research has shown that unfamiliar face recognition is a difficult task, and one which is highly prone to error. In this article, David Robertson, Russ Middlet...

We are usually able to recognise novel instances of familiar faces with little difficulty, yet recognition of unfamiliar faces can be dramatically impaired by natural within-person variability in appearance. In a card-sorting task for facial identity, different photos of the same unfamiliar face are often seen as different people (Jenkins, White, V...