Perceptual Expertise of Forensic Examiners and Reviewers on Tests of Cross-Race and Disguised Face Identification and Face Memory

Forensic facial professionals have been shown in previous studies to identify people from frontal face images more accurately than untrained participants when given 30 s per face pair. We tested whether this superiority holds in more challenging conditions. Two groups of forensic facial professionals (examiners, reviewers) and untrained participants were tested in three lab-based tasks: other-race face identification, disguised face identification, and face memory. For other-race face identification, on same-race faces, examiners were superior to controls; on different-race identification, examiners and controls performed comparably. Examiners were superior to controls for impersonation disguise, but not consistently superior for evasion disguise. Examiners' performance on the Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT+) was marginally better than reviewers and controls. We conclude that under laboratory-style conditions, professional examiners' identification superiority does not generalize completely to other-race and disguised faces. Future work should administer other-race and disguise face identification tests that allow forensic professionals to follow methods and procedures they typically use in casework.