Automated face recognition assists with low‐prevalence face identity mismatches but can bias users.

We present three experiments to study the effects of giving information about the decision of an automated face recognition (AFR) system to participants attempting to decide whether two face images show the same person. We make three contributions designed to make our results applicable to real‐word...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:British Journal of Psychology Vol. 117; no. 2; pp. 567 - 585
Main Authors: Mueller, Melina, Hancock, Peter J. B., Cunningham, Emily K., Watt, Roger J., Carragher, Daniel, Bobak, Anna K.
Format: Article
Published: Wiley-Blackwell May2026
Subjects:
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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      dt: May2026
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        atl: Automated face recognition assists with low‐prevalence face identity mismatches but can bias users.
      aug:
        au:
          Mueller, Melina
          Hancock, Peter J. B.
          Cunningham, Emily K.
          Watt, Roger J.
          Carragher, Daniel
          Bobak, Anna K.
        affil:
          Psychology, Faculty of Natural Sciences, University of Stirling, Stirling, UK
          School of Psychology, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Adelaide, Adelaide South Australia,, Australia
      su:
        Artificial intelligence
        Decision making
        Analysis of variance
        Pearson correlation (Statistics)
        T-test (Statistics)
        Data analysis
        Research funding
        Questionnaires
        Descriptive statistics
        Research bias
        Artificial neural networks
        Statistics
        Data analysis software
        Confidence intervals
        Face perception
        User interfaces
        Regression analysis
      sug:
        subj:
          Artificial intelligence
          Decision making
          Analysis of variance
          Pearson correlation (Statistics)
          T-test (Statistics)
          Data analysis
          Research funding
          Questionnaires
          Descriptive statistics
          Research bias
          Artificial neural networks
          Statistics
          Data analysis software
          Confidence intervals
          Face perception
          User interfaces
          Regression analysis
      keyword:
        attitudes towards AI
        automated face recognition
        decision making
        deep neural networks
        face matching
        face recognition
        attitudes towards AI
        automated face recognition
        decision making
        deep neural networks
        face matching
        face recognition
      ab: We present three experiments to study the effects of giving information about the decision of an automated face recognition (AFR) system to participants attempting to decide whether two face images show the same person. We make three contributions designed to make our results applicable to real‐word use: participants are given the true response of a highly accurate AFR system; the face set reflects the mixed ethnicity of the city of London from where participants are drawn; and there are only 10% of mismatches. Participants were equally accurate when given the similarity score of the AFR system or just the binary decision but shifted their bias towards match and were over‐confident on difficult pairs when given only binary information. No participants achieved the 100% accuracy of the AFR system, and they had only weak insight about their own performance.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
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