The effects of movement on the recognition of famous faces shown in difficult conditions were investigated. Images were presented as negatives, upside down (inverted), and thresholded. Results indicate that, under all these conditions, moving faces were recognized significantly better than static ones. One possible explanation of this effect could be that a moving sequence contains more static information about the different views and expressions of the face than does a single static image. However, even when the amount of static information was equated (Experiments 3 and 4), there was still an advantage for moving sequences that contained their original dynamic properties. The results suggest that the dynamics of the motion provide additional information, helping to access an established familiar face representation. Both the theoretical and the practical implications for these findings are discussed.

Summary: There are large individual differences in the ability to recognise faces. Super-recognisers are exceptionally good at face memory tasks. In London, a small specialist pool of police officers (also labelled 'super-recognisers' by the Metropolitan Police Service) annually makes 1000's of suspect identifications from closed-circuit television footage. Some suspects are disguised, have not been encountered recently or are depicted in poor quality images. Across tests measuring familiar face recognition, unfamiliar face memory and unfamiliar face matching, the accuracy of members of this specialist police pool was approximately equal to a group of non-police super-recognisers. Both groups were more accurate than matched control members of the public. No reliable relationships were found between the face processing tests and object recognition. Within each group, however, there were large performance variations across tests, and this research has implications for the deployment of police worldwide in operations requiring officers with superior face processing ability

Two experiments are reported that assess how well the identity of highly familiar "famous# faces can be masked from short naturalistic television clips[ Recognition of identity was made more di.cult by either pixelating "Experiment 0# or blurring "Experiment 1# the viewed face[ Participants were asked to identify faces from both moving and static clips[ Results indicated that participants were still able to recognize some of the viewed faces\ despite these image degradations[ In addition\ moving images of faces were recognized better than static ones[ The practical and theoretical implications of these _ndings are discussed[ Copyright Þ 1990 John Wiley + Sons\ Ltd[ Correspondence to] Karen Lander\ Department of Psychology\ University of Stirling\ Stirling FK8 3LA\ UK[ E!mail] kl2Ýstir[ac[uk Contract grant sponsor] University of Stirling[ Contract grant sponsor] ESRC[ Contract grant number] R999 12 55 77[ 0 In both experiments reported\ famous faces rather than personally familiar ones have been used[ Personally familiar faces have typically been viewed in person on many occasions[ Famous face identity is much more likely to be learned from a small number of {stereotypical| instances[ Despite this di}erence\ a number of experimental studies have found no qualitative di}erence between the processing of personally familiar and famous faces "see Campbell and De Haan\ 0887^Roberts and Bruce\ 0878#[

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Speech perception provides compelling examples of a strong link between auditory and visual modalities. This link originates in the mechanics of speech production, which, in shaping the vocal tract, determine the movement of the face as well as the sound of the voice. In this paper, we present evidence that equivalent information about identity is available cross-modally from both the face and voice. Using a delayed matching to sample task, XAB, we show that people can match the video of an unfamiliar face, X, to an unfamiliar voice, A or B, and vice versa, but only when stimuli are moving and are played forward. The critical role of time-varying information is underlined by the ability to match faces to voices containing only the coarse spatial and temporal information provided by sine wave speech [5]. The effect of varying sentence content across modalities was small, showing that identity-specific information is not closely tied to particular utterances. We conclude that the physical constraints linking faces to voices result in bimodally available dynamic information, not only about what is being said, but also about who is saying it.

Previous work has suggested that seeing a famous face move aids the recognition of identity, especially when viewing conditions are degraded (Knight Johnston, 1997; Lander, Christie, Bruce, 1999). Experiment 1 investigated whether the beneficial effects of motion are related to a particular type of facial motion (expressing, talking, or rigid motion). Results showed a significant beneficial effect of both expressive and talking movements, but no advantage for rigid motion, compared with a single static image. Experiment 2 investigated whether the advantage for motion is uniform across identity. Participants rated moving famous faces for distinctiveness of motion. The famous faces (moving and static freeze frame) were then used as stimuli in a recognition task. The advantage for face motion was significant only when the motion displayed was distinctive. Results suggest that a reason why moving faces are easier to recognize is because some familiar faces have characteristic motion patterns, which act as an additional cue to identity

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