People of All Ages Demonstrate a Limited Ability to Distinguish between Original and Manipulated Images

We asked 15,873 young, middle-aged and older adults to detect and locate manipulations within images of real-world scenes. Across all ages, people demonstrated limited discriminability and were frequently over-confident in their judgements. Checking for shadow/lighting inconsistencies was the most common strategy for detecting manipulations. A short training-video improved performance marginally.