An in-depth cognitive examination of individuals with superior face recognition skills

Breaking face processing tasks apart to improve their predictive value in the real world: A comment on Ramon, Bobak, and White (2019)

“…Superior recognisers are not necessarily superior in all face processing tasks, or in all aspects of a given task (Bate et al, 2019;Bobak, Bennetts, Parris, Jansari, & Bate, 2016; *Correspondence should be addressed to Christel Devue, School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington, PO Box 600, Wellington 6040, New Zealand (email: christel.devue@vuw.ac.nz). A complementary way to increase this correspondence could be via the examination of the specifics of performance rather than overall scores.…”

“…A complementary way to increase this correspondence could be via the examination of the specifics of performance rather than overall scores. Superior recognisers are not necessarily superior in all face processing tasks, or in all aspects of a given task (Bate et al, 2019;Bobak, Bennetts, Parris, Jansari, & Bate, 2016; *Correspondence should be addressed to Christel Devue, School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington, PO Box 600, Wellington 6040, New Zealand (email: christel.devue@vuw.ac.nz). Devue, Wride, & Grimshaw, 2019).…”

TooManyEyes: super-recogniser directed identification of target individuals on CCTV

“…Recent research [15], testing full-time SRs from the MPS SR Unit in London (n = 7), other police (n = 92) and controls drawn from the public (n = 152) found positive relationships between performances on an early version of the SFCT, the extended version of the Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT+) [5], used in most previous research to allocate SRs to SR groups [e.g., [1][2][3][4][5], and a Change Blindness test [16]. As a group, members of the MPS SR Unit outperformed the other groups on the three tests, although not all achieved SR criteria used in previous research.…”

“…[1][2][3][4][5]. At one end of the ability spectrum are Developmental Prosopagnosics (DPs) who may be adversely affected by a neurodevelopmental impairment in processing facial stimuli but display no apparent neurological damage [6,7].…”

“…At one end of the ability spectrum are Developmental Prosopagnosics (DPs) who may be adversely affected by a neurodevelopmental impairment in processing facial stimuli but display no apparent neurological damage [6,7]. The antitheses are Super-Recognisers (SRs), who compared with the typical population, score higher on tests assessing face perception, simultaneous face matching, and familiar and unfamiliar face recognition [e.g., 1,4,5,8], while performing at about the same level as controls at object recognition [3,4], which suggests that SR, like DP is primarily face-specific.…”