Alice Towler

• The University of Queensland

Despite playing a critical role in our criminal justice system, very little is known about the expertise of forensic scientists. Here, we review three disciplines where research has begun to investigate such expertise: handwriting analysis, fingerprint examination, and facial image comparison. We assess expertise against the scientific standard,but...

Face recognition is thought to rely on representations that encode holistic properties. Paradoxically, professional forensic examiners who identify unfamiliar faces by comparing facial images are trained to adopt a feature-by-feature comparison strategy. Here we tested the effectiveness of this strategy by asking participants to rate facial feature...

Human performance on unfamiliar face matching is known to be highly error prone. However, in organisations where staff are required to perform this task as part of their daily work, attempts are often made to mitigate risk by providing training. Importantly, the methods used in these training courses have not been subjected to empirical validation....

Human factors and their implications for forensic science have attracted increasing levels of interest across criminal justice communities in recent years. Initial interest centred on cognitive biases, but has since expanded such that knowledge from psychology and cognitive science is slowly infiltrating forensic practices more broadly. This articl...

This article provides an explanation of the duties and responsibilities owed by forensic practitioners (and other expert witnesses) when preparing for and presenting evidence in criminal proceedings. It is written in the shadow of reports by the National Academy of Sciences (US), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (US), the Scottish...

Online participant recruitment is a cornerstone of modern psychology research. While this offers clear benefits for studying individual differences in cognitive abilities, test performance can vary across lab-based and web-based settings. Here we assess the stability of normative test scores across popular online recruitment platforms and in-person...

Perceptual expertise is typically domain-specific and rarely generalises beyond an expert’s domain of experience. Forensic feature-comparison examiners outperform the norm in domain-specific visual comparison, but emerging research suggests that they show advantages on other similar tasks outside their domain of expertise. For example, fingerprint...

Online participant recruitment is a cornerstone of modern psychology research. While this offers clear benefits for studying individual differences in cognitive abilities, test performance can vary across lab-based and web-based settings. Here we assess the stability of normative test scores across popular online recruitment platforms and in-person...

People prioritize diagnostic features in classification tasks. However, it is not clear whether this priority is fixed or is flexibly applied depending on the specific classification decision, or how feature use behavior contributes to individual differences in performance. Here we examined whether flexibility in features used in a face identificat...

Hyper‐realistic silicone masks provide a viable route to identity fraud. Over the last decade, more than 40 known criminal acts have been committed by perpetrators using this type of disguise. With the increasing availability and bespoke sophistication of these masks, research must now focus on ways to enhance their detection. In this study, we inv...

People prioritise diagnostic features in classification tasks. However, it is not clear whether this priority is fixed or is flexibly applied depending on the specific classification decision, or how feature use behaviour contributes to individual differences in performance. Here we examined whether flexibility in features used in a face identifica...

This paper distils seven key lessons about ‘error’ from a collaborative webinar series between practitioners at Victoria Police Forensic Services Department and academics. It aims to provide the common understanding of error necessary to foster interdisciplinary dialogue, collaboration and research. The lessons underscore the inevitability, complex...

Facial recognition errors can jeopardize national security, criminal justice, public safety and civil rights. Here, we compare the most accurate humans and facial recognition technology in a detailed lab-based evaluation and international proficiency test for forensic scientists involving 27 forensic departments from 14 countries. We find striking...

People vary in their ability to recognise faces. These individual differences are consistent over time, heritable and associated with brain anatomy. This implies that face identity processing can be improved in applied settings by selecting high performers–‘super-recognisers’ (SRs)–but these selection processes are rarely available for scientific s...

This paper presents a new test of object-matching ability: the Novel Object-Matching Test (NOM Test). Object-matching (or visual comparison) is a complex cognitive and perceptual visual comparison task undertaken by forensic scientists - yet no openly available, standardised and psychometrically validated test of object-matching ability exists. Thi...

Faces are key to everyday social interactions, but our understanding of social attention is based on experiments that present images of faces on computer screens. Advances in wearable eye-tracking devices now enable studies in unconstrained natural settings but this approach has been limited by manual coding of fixations. Here we introduce an autom...

To slow the spread of COVID-19, many people now wear face masks in public. Face masks impair our ability to identify faces, which can cause problems for professional staff who identify offenders or members of the public. Here, we investigate whether performance on a masked face matching task can be improved by training participants to compare diagn...

Forensic science practitioners compare visual evidence samples (e.g. fingerprints) and decide if they originate from the same person or different people (i.e. fingerprint ‘matching’). These tasks are perceptually and cognitively complex—even practising professionals can make errors—and what limited research exists suggests that existing professiona...

Face descriptions inform real‐world identification decisions, for example when eyewitnesses describe criminal perpetrators. However, it is unclear how effective face descriptions are for identification. Here, we examined the accuracy of face identification from verbal descriptions, and how individual differences in face perception relate to produci...

The low prevalence effect is a phenomenon whereby target prevalence affects performance in visual search (e.g., baggage screening) and comparison (e.g., fingerprint examination) tasks, such that people more often fail to detect infrequent target stimuli. For example, when exposed to higher base-rates of ‘matching’ (i.e., from the same person) than...

Visual comparison—comparing visual stimuli (e.g., fingerprints) side by side and determining whether they originate from the same or different source (i.e., “match”)—is a complex discrimination task involving many cognitive and perceptual processes. Despite the real-world consequences of this task, which is often conducted by forensic scientists, l...

Facial recognition errors jeopardize national security, criminal justice, public safety and civil rights. Here, we compare the most accurate humans and facial recognition technology in a detailed lab-based evaluation and international proficiency test for forensic scientists involving 27 forensic departments from 14 countries. We find striking cogn...

Drawing upon decades of scientific research on face perception, recognition and compari- son, this article explains why conventional legal approaches to the interpretation of images (eg from CCTV) to assist with identification are misguided. The article reviews Australian rules and jurisprudence on expert and lay opinion evidence. It also summarise...

To slow the spread of COVID-19, many people now wear face masks in public. Face masks impair our ability to identify faces, which can cause problems for professional staff who must identify offenders and members of the public. Here, we investigate whether performance on a masked face matching task can be improved by training participants to compare...

Identifying unfamiliar faces is surprisingly error-prone, even for experienced professionals who perform this task regularly. Previous attempts to train this ability have been largely unsuccessful, leading many to conclude that face identity processing is hard-wired and not amenable to further perceptual learning. Here, we take a novel expert knowl...

Is it possible to train face identification ability? To answer this question, we review the literature on professional training for facial image comparison practitioners, and the broader psychology literature on training for prosopagnosia patients and the general population. Our review of these literatures finds very little evidence that training c...

Deciding whether or not two images are of the same unfamiliar face is an important task in many professions. These decisions are a critical part of modern identity verification processes with direct—and often profound—consequences for individual rights and the security of society. As a result, the public expect the people entrusted with these decis...

We present a new test–the UNSW Face Test (www.unswfacetest.com)–that has been specifically designed to screen for super-recognizers in large online cohorts and is available free for scientific use. Super-recognizers are people that demonstrate sustained performance in the very top percentiles in tests of face identification ability. Because they re...

Is it possible to train face identification ability? To answer this question, we review the literature on professional training for facial image comparison practitioners, and the broader psychology literature on training for prosopagnosia patients and the general population. Our review of these literatures finds very little evidence that training c...

Deciding whether or not two images are of the same unfamiliar face is an important task in many professions. These decisions are a critical part of modern identity verification processes with direct – and often profound – consequences for individual rights and the security of society. As a result, the public expect the people entrusted with these d...

We present a new test – the UNSW Face Test (www.unswfacetest.com) – that has been specifically designed to screen for super-recognizers in large online cohorts and is available free for scientific use. Super-recognizers are people that demonstrate sustained performance in the very top percentiles in tests of face identification ability. Because the...

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...

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...

Many years of research has established that humans are poor at identifying unfamiliar faces. This poses a significant problem in applied settings that depend on accurate face matching to verify the identity of unfamiliar people, such as when issuing photo-ID documents and in forensic investigations. However, in these situations, face matching decis...

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...

In our everyday lives, we are required to make decisions based upon our statistical intuitions. Often, these involve the comparison of two groups, such as luxury versus family cars and their suitability. Research has shown that the mean difference affects judgements where two sets of data are compared, but the variability of the data has only a min...