Super‐recognisers in Action: Evidence from Face‐matching and Face Memory Tasks

Summary Individuals employed in forensic or security settings are often required to compare faces of ID holders to document photographs, or to recognise the faces of suspects in closed‐circuit television footage. It has long been established that both tasks produce a high error rate amongst typical perceivers. This study sought to determine the performance of individuals with exceptionally good face memory (‘super‐recognisers’) on applied facial identity matching and memory tasks. In experiment 1, super‐recognisers were significantly better than controls when matching target faces to simultaneously presented line‐ups. In experiment 2, super‐recognisers were also better at recognising faces from video footage. These findings suggest that super‐recognisers are more accurate at face matching and face memory tasks than typical perceivers, and they could be valuable expert employees in national security and forensic settings. © 2015 The Authors Applied Cognitive Psychology Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

[1]  A. Burton,et al.  The Glasgow Face Matching Test , 2010, Behavior research methods.

[2]  J. Haxby,et al.  Human neural systems for face recognition and social communication , 2002, Biological Psychiatry.

[3]  Ahmed M. Megreya,et al.  Individual differences in personality and face identification , 2013 .

[4]  W. L. Braje.  Illumination encoding in face recognition: effect of position shift. , 2003, Journal of vision.

[5]  B. Duchaine,et al.  Advances in developmental prosopagnosia research , 2013, Current Opinion in Neurobiology.

[6]  J. Haxby,et al.  The distributed human neural system for face perception , 2000, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[7]  Neil A. Macmillan,et al.  Detection Theory: A User's Guide , 1991 .

[8]  Andrew W Young,et al.  Learning faces from photographs. , 2008, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[9]  Ahmed M. Megreya,et al.  Unfamiliar faces are not faces: Evidence from a matching task , 2006, Memory & cognition.

[10]  C. Wilkinson,et al.  Are facial image analysis experts any better than the general public at identifying individuals from CCTV images? , 2009, Science & justice : journal of the Forensic Science Society.

[11]  V Bruce,et al.  The Use of Pigmentation and Shading Information in Recognising the Sex and Identities of Faces , 1994, Perception.

[12]  Michael B. Lewis,et al.  Navon letters affect face learning and face retrieval. , 2009, Experimental psychology.

[13]  A. Burton,et al.  Passport Officers’ Errors in Face Matching , 2014, PloS one.

[14]  K. Nakayama,et al.  The Cambridge Face Memory Test: Results for neurologically intact individuals and an investigation of its validity using inverted face stimuli and prosopagnosic participants , 2006, Neuropsychologia.

[15]  G. Yovel,et al.  Diagnosing prosopagnosia: Effects of ageing, sex, and participant–stimulus ethnic match on the Cambridge Face Memory Test and Cambridge Face Perception Test , 2009, Cognitive neuropsychology.

[16]  David White,et al.  Evaluating Training Methods for Facial Image Comparison: The Face Shape Strategy Does Not Work , 2014, Perception.

[17]  M. Bach,et al.  Pattern-onset stimulation boosts central multifocal VEP responses. , 2003, Journal of vision.

[18]  P. Garthwaite,et al.  Point and interval estimates of effect sizes for the case-controls design in neuropsychology: Rationale, methods, implementations, and proposed reporting standards , 2010, Cognitive neuropsychology.

[19]  V. Bruce,et al.  Effects of lighting on the perception of facial surfaces. , 1996, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[20]  V. Bruce,et al.  Effects of lighting on the perception of facial surfaces. , 1996, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[21]  Paul Miller,et al.  Verification of face identities from images captured on video. , 1999 .

[22]  A. Mike Burton,et al.  Why has research in face recognition progressed so slowly? : The importance of variability , 2013 .

[23]  Ahmed M. Megreya,et al.  Matching Face Images Taken on the Same Day or Months Apart: the Limitations of Photo ID , 2013 .

[24]  A. Young,et al.  Understanding face recognition. , 1986, British journal of psychology.

[25]  V. Bruce,et al.  Face Recognition in Poor-Quality Video: Evidence From Security Surveillance , 1999 .

[26]  V. Bruce,et al.  Matching identities of familiar and unfamiliar faces caught on CCTV images. , 2001, Journal of experimental psychology. Applied.

[27]  E. Renzi,et al.  Apperceptive and Associative Forms of Prosopagnosia , 1991, Cortex.

[28]  G. Pike,et al.  When Seeing should not be Believing: Photographs, Credit Cards and Fraud , 1997 .

[29]  V. Bruce,et al.  Recognition of unfamiliar faces , 2000, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[30]  P. Hancock,et al.  Improving discrimination and face matching with caricature , 2013 .

[31]  K. Nakayama,et al.  Super-recognizers: People with extraordinary face recognition ability , 2009, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[32]  Ken Nakayama,et al.  Developmental prosopagnosia and super-recognition: No special role for surface reflectance processing , 2012, Neuropsychologia.

[33]  Andrew Russ,et al.  Individual differences in face identification postdict eyewitness accuracy , 2012 .

[34]  When Evidence is a Question of Image , 2004 .

[35]  David White,et al.  Feedback training for facial image comparison , 2014, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[36]  Tim Valentine,et al.  CCTV on trial: Matching video images with the defendant in the dock , 2009 .

[37]  K. Nakayama,et al.  Please Scroll down for Article Cognitive Neuropsychology Family Resemblance: Ten Family Members with Prosopagnosia and Within-class Object Agnosia , 2022 .

[38]  Alan D. Baddeley,et al.  On Training People to Recognize Faces , 1979 .

[39]  Martha J. Farah,et al.  Cognitive Neuropsychology: Patterns of Co-occurrence Among the Associative Agnosias: Implications for Visual Object Representation , 1991 .