Recognising faces: Family, friends and photo-ID

Despite many years of research on face perception, the problem of identification remains unresolved – how do we recognise the people we know? And how does this relate to our use of faces to prove identity in forensic and security settings?

Eminent UK psychologist Prof. Mike Burton will review research on this problem, describing experiments in the lab and in the field alongside computational simulation. He will emphasise the importance of within-person variability (people look different on each encounter) and idiosyncratic experience (viewers’ experience of faces are all different). While computer-based recognition of faces is now extremely good, challenges remain in our understanding of human perception. These may require us to adopt new methods of enquiry.

Prof. Burton recently received both the Bartlett Prize of the Experimental Psychology Society (2025), and the BPS Lifetime Achievement Award (2025).