Unfamiliar face matching with photographs of infants and children

Infants and children travel using passports that are typically valid for five years (e.g. Canada, United Kingdom, United States and Australia). These individuals may also need to be identified using images taken from videos and other sources in forensic situations including child exploitation cases. However, few researchers have examined how useful these images are as a means of identification. We investigated the effectiveness of photo identification for infants and children using a face matching task, where participants were presented with two images simultaneously and asked whether the images depicted the same child or two different children. In Experiment 1, both images showed an infant (