Computers beat humans at identifying fake expressions of pain

A new study has found that a computer system spots real or faked expressions of pain more accurately than people can.

The study conducted by researchers at the University of California San Diego and the University of Toronto has shown that the computer system detect distinctive dynamic features of facial expressions that even people missed.

Marian Bartlett, research professor at UC San Diego's Institute for Neural Computation and lead author of the study said that human observers just aren't very good at telling real from faked expressions of pain.

Senior author Kang Lee, professor at the Dr. Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study at the University of Toronto, said that humans can simulate facial expressions and fake emotions well enough to deceive most observers but the computer's pattern-recognition abilities prove better at telling whether pain is real or faked.

The work, titled 'Automatic Decoding of Deceptive Pain Expressions', is published in the latest issue of Current Biology.