So-called ‘super-recognisers’ are people with a much greater ability to recognise faces in a variety of contexts, but their ability has not been empirically tested. A new study in PNAS shows that super-recognisers do in fact possess greatly superior facial recognition compared to normal peers.
While police departments have known of their abilities for quite some time, it was just over a decade ago, when super-recognisers were described in the literature as having exceptional facial processing abilities. With the increasing use of CCTV in police investigations and the potential for human error, there have been questions raised as to whether super-recognisers could do a better job – or indeed, whether they have empirically superior abilities. A means for actually identifying and defining a super-recogniser as opposed to someone who merely seems to better at recalling faces is therefore needed.
The performance of people with normal facial recognition abilities is not very impressive. While performance is good when people are familiar with the person pictured, studies report an error as high as 35% with unfamiliar faces. Even when people are asked to compare a live person standing in front of them with a photo, a recent study found they still got more than 20% of their answers wrong.
For this study, researchers enrolled 73 super-recogniser and 45 control participants. They compared the two groups on performance on three challenging tests of face identity processing recommended for super-recogniser identification; as well as performance for perpetrator identification using four CCTV sequences depicting five perpetrators and police line-ups created for criminal investigation purposes. They found that the face identity processing tests used here are valid in measuring such abilities and identifying super-recognisers. In addition, they determined that super-recognisers excel at perpetrator identification relative to control participants, with more correct perpetrator identifications, the better their performance across lab tests.
