Validating a New Trial Procedure for Assessing Human-Algorithm Teaming in One-to-One Face Matching Tasks

A handful of recent studies have investigated human performance on one-to-one face matching tasks when assisted by an Automated Facial Recognition System (AFRS). The aim of the current study was to validate a new experimental trial procedure, which builds on that first introduced by Carragher and Hancock (2023). Here we recruited a final sample of 74 participants who completed the short version of the Glasgow Face Matching Test 2 (GFMT2-S), using our “new” trial procedure. These participants made an “independent” unassisted identification decision (“same” or “different”) for each pair of faces, before seeing the identification decision made by a simulated AFRS (accuracy = 95%). These participants then made a final “assisted” identification decision for the same trial. We compared the performance achieved by participants using this new trial procedure to that of a randomly selected subsample of 74 participants from Carragher et al. (2023), who completed the same face matching task with the same simulated AFRS, but using the “old” trial procedure introduced by Carragher and Hancock (2023). These participants made a single identification decision for each pair of faces, which was either independent or with assistance from the AFRS, depending on the experimental block. Our results show that the performance of the two trial procedure conditions did not differ on the primary outcome measure of overall accuracy. We conclude that our new trial procedure is suitable for further experimental investigation of human-algorithm teaming in the context of the one-to-one face matching task.