Understanding Professional Expertise in Unfamiliar Face Matching

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 decisions to perform accurately. But do they? Here we review 29 published tests comparing face matching accuracy in professional and novice groups. Twelve of these tests show no significant differences between professional and novice groups, suggesting that merely performing the task in daily work is not sufficient to improve accuracy. However, specialist groups of facial examiners and police super-recognizers consistently outperform novices. Staff selection, mentorship, deliberate practice, motivation, feedback and training may all contribute to enhancing the performance of individuals working in these groups, and future research is necessary to delineate their relative contributions.