title: Passport officers' errors in face matching.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: White
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
authors.forename: Richard I
authors.initials: RI
authors.lastname: Kemp
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of York, York, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Rob
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Jenkins
authors.affiliation: The Australian Passport Office, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Barton, Australia.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Matheson
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: A Mike
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Burton
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D004641:Emigration and Immigration; D004650:Employee Performance Appraisal; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual