Passport officers' errors in face matching

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 9; no. 8; p. e103510
• Main Authors: White, David, Kemp, Richard I, Jenkins, Rob, Matheson, Michael, Burton, A Mike
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 18-08-2014; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Adult; Biology and Life Sciences; Consent; Emigration and Immigration; Employee Performance Appraisal; Employment; Experiments; Face; Female; Females; Fraud; Humans; Identification cards; Laboratories; Male; Matching; Middle Aged; Occupational training; Passports; Pattern Recognition, Visual; Personnel selection; Security; Students; Training; United Kingdom > UK; Sydney New South Wales Australia
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0103510

Photo-ID is widely used in security settings, despite research showing that viewers find it very difficult to match unfamiliar faces. Here we test participants with specialist experience and training in the task: passport-issuing officers. First, we ask officers to compare photos to live ID-card bearers, and observe high error rates, including 14% false acceptance of 'fraudulent' photos. Second, we compare passport officers with a set of student participants, and find equally poor levels of accuracy in both groups. Finally, we observe that passport officers show no performance advantage over the general population on a standardised face-matching task. Across all tasks, we observe very large individual differences: while average performance of passport staff was poor, some officers performed very accurately--though this was not related to length of experience or training. We propose that improvements in security could be made by emphasising personnel selection.