The Impact of Age on Human Face Matching Performance with Images of Children

Abstract

The ability to accurately conduct facial comparisons with images of children is instrumental for various applied purposes, such as the prevention of child trafficking. Despite this, previous research has shown that one-to-one face matching is especially challenging on images of young children and those which show significant age-related facial changes. However, limited research has tested performance on more operationally challenging face matching tasks (one-to-eight) using images of children. This study used a one-to-eight task to explore the extent that performance varied across three childhood age groups (0-5, 5-10 and 10-15) with a 5-year age variation between target and comparison images. Participants (N = 42) completed 120 randomised face matching trials and their accuracy and confidence ratings were analysed. Results found the worst performance for the 0-5-year age group (16% accuracy), compared to 5-10 (26%) and 10-15 (30%) groups, suggesting that performance increased with age. Additionally, no significant differences were found between target-present and target-absent trials. The alarmingly high error rates found in all conditions highlights the importance of understanding and improving performance. Future research should continue to build upon these findings by testing generalisability to practitioner populations, exploring individual differences and evaluating ways to improve performance.