The Role of Perception in Age Estimation

Law enforcement is increasingly called upon to investigate child exploitation crimes, a task that involves the important task of estimating the age of depicted children. There is limited research into our ability to perceive adult versus child and to more specifically estimate the age of a child based upon an image. There are few training programs available and lack of uniform methodology for child age estimation. A more stable foundation can be found through input from multidisciplinary fields in science and Art. The results of surveys and review of multidisciplinary literature indicate that the human ability to perceive the difference between juvenile and adult is a not just a matter of common sense, but a hardwired, preconscious condition of human experience based upon perceptual cues, and further, indicates a normative ability to make reasonably accurate age estimations based upon facial features and proportion when provided with an evaluative framework.