Is this pain real or faked? A new study suggests that machine learning software can do a better job of determining the answer than humans can. (Credit: Dominic Ali, University of Toronto)
According to a new study, humans are not very good at determining whether someone’s face is expressing real pain (e.g. from having one’s arm immersed in cold water) versus faked pain. Even after training, humans got it right only 55 per cent of the time, just slightly better than random chance.
By contrast, image recognition software and machine learning techniques were able to get the answer right 85 per cent of the time. Such techniques could have benefits for law enforcement, human resources and even counter-terrorism.
Original research paper published in the journal Current Biology on March 20, 2014.
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