Drawing the Artist: the Advantage of Artistic Ability for the Construction of Holistic Facial-Composite Images.

Abstract

Building on Valentine’s (1991) face space theory and evidence suggesting artists possess superior internal-feature encoding (e.g., Devue & Barsics, 2015; Kozbelt et al., 2010), this study investigated whether such an advantage would improve the construction of forensic facial composites. Artists and non-artists described a previously-seen unfamiliar face using a cognitive interview and then constructed a composite of it using one of the holistic facial-composite systems, EvoFIT. The effectiveness of the composites was assessed by asking participants who were familiar with the target identities to name the composites; we also asked further participants to rate the composites for likeness. Further, descriptive terms of the face provided by constructors during the cognitive interview were also analysed. Artist-generated composites were named significantly more often and rated significantly higher for likeness than non-artist composites, despite artists using significantly fewer descriptive terms, supporting a link between perceptual expertise and enhanced composite performance. Practical implications of the research are discussed.