Computer Beats People At Detecting Fake Pain

fake pain

A computer system can spot real or faked expressions of pain more accurately than people can.

Says Marian Bartlett, research professor at University of California, San Diego’s Institute for Neural Computation and lead author of the study:





And, even after training, humans only improved accuracy to a modest 55 percent. The computer system attains 85 percent accuracy.

“In highly social species such as humans,” says Lee, “faces have evolved to convey rich information, including expressions of emotion and pain. And, because of the way our brains are built, people can simulate emotions they’re not actually experiencing—so successfully that they fool other people.


Adds Bartlett,

“By revealing the dynamics of facial action through machine vision systems. Our approach has the potential to elucidate ‘behavioral fingerprints’ of the neural-control systems involved in emotional signaling.”

Fakers’ Mouths


“Further investigations,” says the researchers, “will explore whether over-regularity is a general feature of fake expressions.”




Original Study

Photo: Raíssa Ruschel/Flickr