Construction of Facial Composites from Eyewitness Memory.

Law enforcement agencies often rely on practical technologies to help witnesses and victims of crimes construct likenesses of faces from memory. These 'face composites' are typically circulated to law enforcement officers and made accessible to the public in the hope that someone familiar with the depicted person will recognise their likeness and thus provide the police with a suspect. We will review methods for constructing such likenesses from memory dating back to the portrait parlé of Alphonse Bertillon (Signaletic instructions including the theory and practice of anthropometrical identification.

Parental reference photos do not always improve the accuracy of forensic age progressions.

During long-term missing children cases, forensic artists construct age-progressions to estimate the child's current appearance. It is commonly believed that incorporating information about the child's biological relatives is critical in accurately estimating the child's current appearance. However, some evidence suggests that predicting appearance based on inheritance of features may be error prone.

Constructing identifiable composite faces: The importance of cognitive alignment of interview and construction procedure.

We investigated the impact of congruency between the witness interview and method used to construct a composite face. Experiment 1, using a typical feature-by-feature composite method, revealed that aligning cognitive processes during interview and face construction enhanced the effectiveness of composites compared with composites produced following unaligned (incongruent) procedures. Experiment 2 revealed that incorporating character judgments in the witness interview substantially enhanced identification of feature-based composites when constructing the central (internal) features first, suggesting that such judgments focus attention on this region of the face.

Reevaluating the role of verbalization of faces for composite production: Descriptions of offenders matter!

Standard forensic practice necessitates that a witness describes an offender's face prior to constructing a visual likeness, a facial composite. However, describing a face can interfere with face recognition, although a delay between description and recognition theoretically should alleviate this issue. In Experiment 1, participants produced a free recall description either 3-4 hr or 2 days after intentionally or incidentally encoding a target face, and then constructed a composite using a modern "feature" system immediately or after 30 min.

The impact of external facial features on the construction of facial composites.

Witnesses may construct a composite face of a perpetrator using a computerised interface. Police practitioners guide witnesses through this unusual process, the goal being to produce an identifiable image. However, any changes a perpetrator makes to their external facial-features may interfere with this process.

Applied screening tests for the detection of superior face recognition.

In recent years there has been growing interest in the identification of people with superior face recognition skills, for both theoretical and applied investigations. These individuals have mostly been identified via their performance on a single attempt at a tightly controlled test of face memory-the long form of the Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT+). The consistency of their skills over a range of tests, particularly those replicating more applied policing scenarios, has yet to be examined systematically.

Chatting in the face of the eyewitness: The impact of extraneous cell-phone conversation on memory for a perpetrator.

Cell-phone conversation is ubiquitous within public spaces. The current study investigates whether ignored cell-phone conversation impairs eyewitness memory for a perpetrator. Participants viewed a video of a staged crime in the presence of 1 side of a comprehensible cell-phone conversation (meaningful halfalogue), 2 sides of a comprehensible cell-phone conversation (meaningful dialogue), 1 side of an incomprehensible cell-phone conversation (meaningless halfalogue), or quiet.

When age-progressed images are unreliable: The roles of external features and age range.

When children go missing for many years, investigators commission age-progressed images from forensic artists to depict an updated appearance. These images have anecdotal success, and systematic research has found they lead to accurate recognition rates comparable to outdated photos. The present study examines the reliability of age progressions of the same individuals created by different artists.

Holistic face processing can inhibit recognition of forensic facial composites.

Facial composite systems help eyewitnesses to show the appearance of criminals. However, likenesses created by unfamiliar witnesses will not be completely accurate, and people familiar with the target can find them difficult to identify. Faces are processed holistically; we explore whether this impairs identification of inaccurate composite images and whether recognition can be improved.

Cross-age effects on forensic face construction.

The own-age bias (OAB) refers to recognition memory being more accurate for people of our own age than other age groups (e.g., Wright and Stroud, 2002).

Configural and featural information in facial-composite images.

Eyewitnesses are often invited to construct a facial composite, an image created of the person they saw commit a crime that is used by law enforcement to locate criminal suspects. In the current paper, the effectiveness of composite images was investigated from traditional feature systems (E-FIT and PRO-fit), where participants (face constructors) selected individual features to build the face, and a more recent holistic system (EvoFIT), where they 'evolved' a composite by repeatedly selecting from arrays of complete faces. Further participants attempted to name these composites when seen as an unaltered image, or when blurred, rotated, linearly stretched or converted to a photographic negative.

Whole-face procedures for recovering facial images from memory.

Research has indicated that traditional methods for accessing facial memories usually yield unidentifiable images. Recent research, however, has made important improvements in this area to the witness interview, method used for constructing the face and recognition of finished composites. Here, we investigated whether three of these improvements would produce even-more recognisable images when used in conjunction with each other.

Recovering faces from memory: the distracting influence of external facial features.

Recognition memory for unfamiliar faces is facilitated when contextual cues (e.g., head pose, background environment, hair and clothing) are consistent between study and test.

Familiarity effects in the construction of facial-composite images using modern software systems.

We investigate the effect of target familiarity on the construction of facial composites, as used by law enforcement to locate criminal suspects. Two popular software construction methods were investigated. Participants were shown a target face that was either familiar or unfamiliar to them and constructed a composite of it from memory using a typical 'feature' system, involving selection of individual facial features, or one of the newer 'holistic' types, involving repeated selection and breeding from arrays of whole faces.

Improving the quality of facial composites using a holistic cognitive interview.

Witnesses to and victims of serious crime are normally asked to describe the appearance of a criminal suspect, using a Cognitive Interview (CI), and to construct a facial composite, a visual representation of the face. Research suggests that focusing on the global aspects of a face, as opposed to its facial features, facilitates recognition and improves composite quality; also, that the CI enables more effective use of a composite system. The current study evaluated a novel "holistic" Cognitive Interview (H-CI).

Parallel approaches to composite production: interfaces that behave contrary to expectation.

This paper examines two facial composite systems that present multiple faces during construction to more closely resemble natural face processing. A 'parallel' version of PRO-fit was evaluated, which presents facial features in sets of six or twelve, and EvoFIT, a system in development, which contains a holistic face model and an evolutionary interface. The PRO-fit parallel interface turned out not to be quite as good as the 'serial' version as it appeared to interfere with holistic face processing.

The relative importance of external and internal features of facial composites.

Three experiments are reported that compare the quality of external with internal regions within a set of facial composites using two matching-type tasks. Composites are constructed with the aim of triggering recognition from people familiar with the targets, and past research suggests internal face features dominate representations of familiar faces in memory. However the experiments reported here show that the internal regions of composites are very poorly matched against the faces they purport to represent, while external feature regions alone were matched almost as well as complete composites.