In recent years there has been growing interest in the identification of people with superior face recognition skills, for both theoretical and applied investigations. These individuals have mostly been identified via their performance on a single attempt at a tightly controlled test of face memory—the long form of the Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT+). The consistency of their skills over a range of tests, particularly those replicating more applied policing scenarios, has yet to be examined systematically. The current investigation screened 200 people who believed they have superior face recognition skills, using the CFMT+ and three new, more applied tests (measuring face memory, face matching and composite-face identification in a crowd). Of the sample, 59.5% showed at least some consistency in superior face recognition performance, although only five individuals outperformed controls on overall indices of target-present and target-absent trials. Only one participant outperformed controls on the Crowds test, suggesting that some applied face recognition tasks require very specific skills. In conclusion, future screening protocols need to be suitably thorough to test for consistency in performance, and to allow different types of superior performer to be detected from the outset. Screening for optimal performers may sometimes need to directly replicate the task in question, taking into account target-present and target-absent performance. Self-selection alone is not a reliable means of identifying those at the top end of the face recognition spectrum.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s41235-018-0116-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in people with superior face recognition skills. Yet identification of these individuals has mostly relied on criterion performance on a single attempt at a single measure of face memory. The current investigation aimed to examine the consistency of superior face recognition skills in 30 police officers, both across tests that tap into the same process and between tests that tap into different components of face processing. Overall indices of performance across related measures were found to identify different superior performers to isolated test scores. Further, different top performers emerged for target-present versus target-absent indices, suggesting that signal detection measures are the most useful indicators of performance. Finally, a dissociation was observed between superior memory and matching performance. Super-recognizer screening programmes hould therefore include overall indices summarizing multiple attempts at related tests, allowing for individuals to rank highly on different (and sometimes very specific) tasks.

Conflict in the Stroop task is thought to come from various stages of processing, including semantics. Two-to-one response mappings, in which two response-set colors share a common response location, have been used to isolate stimulus-stimulus (semantic) from stimulus-response conflict in the Stroop task. However, the use of congruent trials as a baseline means that the measured effects could be exaggerated by facilitation, and recent research using neutral, non-colorword trials as a baseline has supported this notion. In the present study, we sought to provide evidence for stimulusstimulus conflict using an oculomotor Stroop task and an early, preresponse pupillometric measure of effort. The results provided strong (Bayesian) evidence for no statistical difference between two-to-one response-mapping trials and neutral trials in both saccadic response latencies and preresponse pupillometric measures, supporting the notion that the difference between same-response and congruent trials indexes facilitation in congruent trials, and not stimulus-stimulus conflict, thus providing evidence against the presence of semantic conflict in the Stroop task. We also demonstrated the utility of preresponse pupillometry in measuring Stroop interference, supporting the idea that pupillary effects are not simply a residue of making a response.Keywords Stroop . Semantic conflict . Same response . Pupillometry . OculomotorThe Stroop effect refers to the finding that people are slower to name the color that a word is printed in when the word spells out another color (incongruent trials-e.g., the word red in blue) than to name the color of a square (Stroop, 1935) or to name a word's color when the word spells out the same color (congruent trials-e.g., the word red in red; Klein, 1964; see MacLeod, 1991, for a review). The Stroop task has been described as the gold standard for measuring attention (MacLeod, 1992) and has been the focus of influential models of attention (e.g., Cohen, Dunbar, & McClelland 1990;Glaser & Glaser, 1989;Roelofs, 2003).The Stroop effect has been attributed to having to resolve conflict at the response stage when the color and the meaning of the word each activate different responses (referred to as response conflict or stimulus-response conflict; Cohen et al., 1990;MacLeod, 1991;Roelofs, 2003). However, some researchers have posited that, in addition to interference/ conflict resolution at the response stage, performance in the Stroop task also requires conflict resolution at earlier processing stages (e.g

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A series of recent studies have utilized the two-to-one mapping paradigm in the Stroop task. In this paradigm, the word red might be presented in blue when both red and blue share the same-response key (same-response trials). This manipulation has been used to show the separate contributions of (within) semantic category conflict and response conflict to Stroop interference. Such results evidencing semantic category conflict are incompatible with models of the Stroop task that are based on response conflict only. However, the nature of same-response trials is unclear since they are also likely to involve response facilitation given that both dimensions of the stimulus provide evidence toward the same-response. In this study we explored this possibility by comparing them with three other trial types. We report strong (Bayesian) evidence for no statistical difference between same-response and non-color word neutral trials, faster responses to same-response trials than to non-response set incongruent trials, and no differences between same-response vs. congruent trials when contingency is controlled. Our results suggest that same-response trials are not different from neutral trials indicating that they cannot be used reliably to determine the presence or absence of semantic category conflict. In light of these results, the interpretation of a series of recent studies might have to be reassessed.