Our group also examines people who are exceptionally good at facial identity recognition. While most people are very good at the recognition of highly familiar faces (i.e. those of family, friends and colleagues), we vary much more substantially in our ability to recognize faces that we have had little exposure to. Importantly, this skill is required in many security and policing scenarios, such as passport control, CCTV-to-image matching, and spotting a missing or wanted person in a crowd or unexpected context. It is therefore striking that most people perform rather poorly at tasks requiring the recognition of unfamiliar faces.
In 2009, the first report of people with extraordinary face recognition skills (so-called “super-recognizers”) was published, followed by a further investigation in 2012. Both papers examined the performance of super-recognizers on laboratory-based tasks, using tests that are typically used to assess those with prosopagnosia. Since then, our laboratory has published key papers that examine the performance of super-recognizers on more applied tests of face recognition that actually resemble tasks that are frequently encountered in policing and national security settings. While our findings indicate that super-recognizers outperform typical perceivers at these tasks, they also suggest that current tests used to identify super-recognizers are not suitable for use with this population. Further, it seems that different super-recognizers excel at different tasks: some are excellent at face matching whereas others are better at long-term memory for faces.
Our current work is exploring this issue further, and we are developing more sensitive tests for the identification of different types of super recognition. We are also exploring the theoretical underpinnings of super recognition, and in a recent paper compare the eye movements of super-recognizers, those with developmental prosopagnosia and typical participants. Surprisingly, we found that super-recognizers spend more time examining the nose and less time examining the eyes. It may be that the central region of the face is an optimal viewing position that allows information relevant to facial identity to be most efficiently extracted.
We are working with several security and policing agencies to further develop this work, and recently received funding from the Leverhulme Trust to examine the age perception abilities of super-recognizers. You can read summaries of our research in these articles in the New Scientist and Scientific American magazines. You can access our research papers using the button below.
If you have been asked to read the information on this page by your employer and would like to be screened for super recognition, please register your interest with your organization. If we are not currently working with your organization and you would like to enquire about our screening and research protocols, please contact Prof. Sarah Bate directly. If you are a member of the public who believes they may be a super-recognizer and would like to participate in our research, please register for an online assessment using the button below.
Prosopagnosia Research at Bournemouth University 