Project partners: University of Zurich and Zurich State Police

Behavioural detection of individuals with hostile intentions and face recognition are important tasks in both general policing and counter-terrorism. Within the sub-project Behaviour Detection, we investigated …

  1. whether offenders can be detected during the build-up phase of a criminal/terrorist act based on their non-verbal behaviour,
  2. which abilities, skills and what kind of knowledge increase performance in this task, and
  3. whether non-verbal behavioural cues can be identified that are related to hostile intentions.

Within the sub-project Face Recognition, we

  1. developed a reliable and valid face recognition test to measure performance in unfamiliar face recognition and
  2. studied different strategies to improve unfamiliar face recognition.

This project was led by Franziska Hofer and has been funded by the Federal Office of Civil Aviation (FOCA).