A joint study by researchers at the University of California
San Diego and the University of Toronto has found that a computer system spots
real or faked expressions of pain more accurately than people can. The work,
titled “Automatic Decoding of Deceptive Pain Expressions,” is published in the
latest issue of Current Biology.
“The computer system managed to detect distinctive dynamic
features of facial expressions that people missed,” said Marian Bartlett,
research professor at UC San Diego’s Institute for Neural Computation and lead
author of the study. “Human observers just aren’t very good at telling real
from faked expressions of pain.”