Article archive / November 1, 2014
Originally published: . Volume 5, No. 15. Source pages: 1, 5.
The National Notary Association is embracing research from Louisiana State University Assistant Psychology Professor, Dr. Megan Papesh, to help it’s members develop their understanding of a key scientific finding: checking photo IDs is very difficult.
Dr. Papesh teamed up with the National Notary Association (NNA) to develop an ID matching quiz that notaries were able to take online.
More than 2,900 NNA members took the quiz with some surprising results. The Notaries did not do as well as test subjects.
In “The Notary Challenge: Matching Faces To ID Harder Than You Think,” published in September by NAA in Notary News, Michael Lewis said that about 32 percent of notaries who took the online quiz failed to identify the imposter. And also, about 31 percent of the time they failed to identify a correct match.
“That’s really surprising,” Dr. Papesh told Lewis about the quiz results. The NNA’s quiz was designed to be similar to the group of Papesh’s subjects who were shown a high percentage of fakes. This research group got it wrong 20 percent of the time.
But, “It’s incredibly difficult to match a face to a photo ID,” said Papesh.
Papesh and co-author Dr. Stephen Goldinger from the University of Arizona have found that error rates for catching a face to photo ID mismatch could go as high as 40 percent under certain conditions. Their work is published in Attention, Perception and Psychophysics.
The researchers examined the ability of people to match face photos to IDs under conditions where the observer expects to encounter a fake ID only rarely, compared to when the observer expects to encounter a high number of fake IDs. When the observer expected a high number of faked IDs, the error rates were about 20 percent.
However, during trials where the frequency of faked IDs were less regular and frequent, the error rates jumped to over 40 percent misses.
Lewis noted that it can be very hard for notaries to tell if an ID is correct where a signer’s ID photo could be a decade old or more. Papesh also told Lewis that cross- cultural differences complicate matters because people have a hard time identifying people from a different race or culture.
As imperfect as matching faces to ID photos is, there isn’t a better way to identify people at present because reliable facial recognition technology is not available, Papesh said.
“We’re currently working on research designed to reveal individual differences in people who are/are not good at that task,” Dr. Papesh told the Times, “and that information will be used to inform possible training decisions. We’re using eye-tracking to see if there are key features that people rely more/less on for accurate performance,” she said.
The NNA recommends to its members to look for suspicious circumstances, such as a person who is trying to rush the notary. Papesh explained to the NNA, that notaries should take their time. “Most of the time when people make a really critical error in checking someone’s ID, it’s because they inconvenience the person whose ID they are checking,” she told Lewis. “They let something go. So it’s important to take more time.”
Papesh will be continuing her work with the NNA. “I’m going to speak at their 2015 conference,” she said, “and have some of their members run through a battery of face matching tasks and any possible training regimens that we are able to devise …”
Readers can take the NNA Quiz for themselves at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/LQ TRNY9).
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