Study title

People can recognise the faces of friends and family across a huge range of conditions, including across changes in age. Changes over time are, however, a problem for unfamiliar face processing. For example, our passports can be up to ten years old, and yet a viewer checking our identity must nevertheless make the match. Some people are particularly good at unfamiliar face processing - people known as super-recognisers are employed in some police and security settings. In addition, trained practitioners, known as forensic examiners, have been found to have an advantage at face matching. However, we do not know whether these people are especially good at generalising photos across age ranges and at matching/recognising age separated images. This project investigated the ability to recognise familiar and unfamiliar faces across age-separated images using a series of behavioural experiments and computational modelling. The data provided here examined the ability to generalise across age in untrained control participants, super-recognisers and forensic examiners.We can recognise the faces of our friends and family across a huge range of conditions. However, despite decades of research, we still do not know how this is achieved. One clue - so far unstudied - arises from our perception of faces as they age. For those around us, we typically only notice face changes when shown an old picture. For famous people, some have spent a lifetime in the public eye (The Queen, Paul McCartney); whereas others are famous for more limited times periods (Angela Merkel, Meghan Markle). How do we represent these people in order to recognise them? In this project, I will study the psychological mechanisms that allow us to recognise the same face across substantial changes. For example, do we need multiple representations of The Queen or Paul McCartney, or have we somehow developed representations of them that are sufficiently general to work across the huge range of their photos? For...