Matching unfamiliar faces is a well-studied task, apparently capturing important everyday decisions such as ID checks. In typical lab studies participants make same/different judgements to pairs of faces, presented in isolation and without context. However, it has recently become clear that matching faces embedded in documents (e.g. passports and driving licences) induces a bias, resulting in elevated levels of ‘same person’ responses. While practically important, it remains unclear whether this bias arises due to expectations induced by the ID cards or interference between textual information and faces. Here we observe the same bias when faces are embedded in blank (i.e. non-authoritative) cards carrying basic personal information, but not when the same information is presented alongside a face without the card (Experiments 1 & 2). Cards bearing unreadable text (blurred or in an unfamiliar alphabet) do not induce the bias but those bearing arbitrary (non-biographical) words do (Experiments 3 and 4). The results suggest a complex basis for the effect, relying on multiple factors which happen to converge in photo-ID.

匹配不熟悉的面孔是一项经过充分研究的任务，显然可以捕捉重要的日常决策，例如身份证检查。在典型的实验室研究中，参与者对单独呈现且没有上下文的成对面孔做出相同/不同的判断。然而，最近很明显，嵌入文件（例如护照和驾驶执照）中的匹配面孔会引起偏见，导致“同一个人”的反应水平升高。虽然实际上很重要，但目前尚不清楚这种偏见是由于身份证引起的期望还是文本信息和面部之间的干扰造成的。在这里，当面部嵌入带有基本个人信息的空白（即非权威）卡片时，我们观察到相同的偏差，但当相同的信息与没有卡片的面部一起呈现时，我们观察到相同的偏差（实验 1 和 2）。带有不可读文本（模糊或不熟悉的字母表）的卡片不会引起偏见，但带有任意（非传记）单词的卡片会引起偏见（实验 3 和 4）。结果表明该效果的基础很复杂，它依赖于恰好在照片 ID 中收敛的多个因素。