Friday, December 12, 2014

We Aren't Ready for Facial Recognition


It is understood that the ability to identify certain objects or scenes as threats is a product of human evolution.  Your brain is hardwired to recollect and associate real world examples with people or objects that we understand to be dangerous.  In other words, it keeps you safe.

The Fusiform Gyrus (highlighted above) is the area in the brain responsible for facial recognition.

Have you ever been presented with a familiar face, clearly recognizable, but lacked the ability to put a name to it?  This phenomenon is known as Recognition Without Identification (RWI).  Dr. Anthony J. Ryals of Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine recently spoke to us about his study regarding RWI. He published a research article in the 2013 edition of the Psychonomic Society titled “Intuitively Detecting What Is Hidden Within A Visual Mask: Familiar–Novel Discrimination And Threat Detection For Unidentified Stimuli”.  The purpose of his experiment was to relate RWI to instinctive feelings that manifest when presented with a specific situation, specifically the instincts associated with threat detection. For his first experiment, participants were presented with impaired versions, images that underwent a monochromatic noise filter, of famous and non-famous faces, 120 images in total.  Their ability to identify each stimulus was analyzed with familiarity ratings ranging from 1 (very unfamiliar) to 10 (very familiar).  The participants were then presented with non-impaired versions of the same faces and asked to rate how famous that particular person was, 0 (not famous) to 9 (very famous).  The second experiment was performed in the same manner solely substituting the faces with famous and non-famous locations, recording familiarity and magnitude of fame, respectively.  In the third experiment, the stimuli were replaced with threatening and nonthreatening images (half living and half nonliving).  The results of this study indicated that the higher familiarity ratings were given to the famous faces/locations and the threatening images as opposed to the non-famous and non-threatening images.  


In relation to the real world, the present study could suffice in the conditioning of law enforcers, in hopes to understand and improve their abilities to identify certain people as threats, as this is often the case of life or death.  However, they might not have to anymore. Facial Recognition has developed into a technological tool that allows its users to gain access to a persons identity solely based on unique, key points attributed to that persons face.  In this recent NY Times article, “Never Forgetting A Face”, Natasha Singer writes of Dr. Joseph Atick and describes the advancements and benefits of delicate face recognition software.  Dr. Atick is one of the foundational developers of facial recognition.  He began pitching his work to the government and fraud companies in the 90’s in hopes to provide a new way of catching criminals.  He speaks on the achievements of his work, "We saved lives," he said during the conference in mid-March. "We have solved crimes" (Singer, 2014).  It is evident that the development of this technology has benefited society in the recent years.  Dr. Atick speaks of facial recognition being applied not only nationally, but on a global perspective as well, "The technology is already in use in law enforcement and casinos. In New York, Pennsylvania and California, police departments with face-recognition systems can input the image of a robbery suspect taken from a surveillance video in a bank, for instance, and compare the suspect’s faceprint against their image gallery of convicted criminals, looking for a match. …  In Japan, a few grocery stores use face-matching to classify some shoppers as shoplifters or even “complainers” and blacklist them” (Singer, 2014).  It seems as if nothing can go wrong with this new ability, however, Dr. Atick understands the dangers that can be associated with it.  The number one concern is the invasion of privacy.  Simple face identification could provide all background information surrounding a client.  With this new technology on the line, does it in fact guarantee the safety of the common people? Will the ability to remotely ping threats improve our lives or endanger them?  If human evolution provided us with the ability to analyze our surrounding for threats, would this new ability hamper our human instincts?  The idea of facial recognition is a very controversial topic.  In many ways it seems to benefit our society; keeping our streets safe, identifying wanted criminals from afar, but there will always be that factor of privacy.  Maybe the world isn’t ready to accept the fact that technology is passing up the human race.







References:

Cleary, Anne M., Anthony J. Ryals, and Jason S. Nomi. "Intuitively Detecting What Is   Hidden Within A Visual Mask: Familiar–Novel Discrimination And Threat   
Detection For Unidentified Stimuli." (2013) Psychonomic Society. p989-999.


Singer, Natasha. "Never Forgetting a Face." (2014) The New York Times. The New                  York Times.

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