Tessa is a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Lincoln. Her research investigates how people perceive and recognise faces, and how faces are processed in the brain. She uses a whole range of approaches from simple face matching tasks, through to neuroimaging techniques such as MRI and EEG. She’s a hesitant python programmer and loves anything geeky.

Faces play an important role in everyday life, and our abilities to perceive and recognise faces have a profound impact on how we interact with people. Generally people think they’re quite good with faces – it’s normally easy to recognise someone we know. The problems arise when we’re dealing with unfamiliar faces, which is a job that’s particularly important for people working with photo identification, e.g. police officers, bouncers, and passport control officers. As part of their jobs, they need to be able to accurately match a face to a photo ID.

Tessa will talk to us about why we think it’s difficult for us to do simple tasks with unfamiliar faces and the implications this has for photo ID. She will also talk to us about a relatively new problem facing the world of photo identification – face morphs – which ironically is both created, and could be solved, by computers.

This event will take place at Lincoln's new Digital Hub, Mosaic so we hope you can join us to have a look at this great new space. As always there will be plenty of time for socialising with like-minded people along with drinks and pizza provided by our kind sponsors.

Car parking is available on Free School Lane or 2 minutes walk away at Broadgate multistory car park.

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