KEELE RESEARCH 19
Keele researcher to study
how we recognise faces
Dr Sarah Laurence has
been awarded a £235,000
grant from the Economic
and Social Research
Council to explore how
we recognise faces across
substantial changes in
appearance, which has
implications in security
and forensic work.
T
he three-year study, Recognition of
the Ageing Face, will explore how
memories allow people to remember
familiar faces and determine why unfamiliar
face recognition is particularly prone to error
when the person has aged, such as proving
one’s identity when renewing a passport or
identifying a criminal from old CCTV footage.
Dr Laurence said: “The face can change
dramatically in appearance as people age.
This doesn’t seem to affect familiar, but it
makes it difficult to decide whether or not two
images are of the same unfamiliar person.
My research will look at memory, perception
and ageing by examining the different factors
that affect a person’s ability to match an
image with someone who is now older.”
The research will also assess how experts
in security and police settings who have
above-average face recognition abilities,
known as “super-recognisers”, can match
a photo of someone with a face that has
changed with age.
Dr Laurence added: “Unfamiliar face matching
is difficult, especially if the photo was taken
a long time ago – for example, our passports
can be up to ten-years old or even more,
but super-recognisers at the UK Passport
Office must match the person in front of
them with that old passport photo. In my
study I will test how super-recognisers
can generalise photographs across age
ranges and the findings could help establish
recommendations for recruiting and training
security and police personnel.”