Do People Have Insight into their Face Recognition Abilities?

Abstract

Diagnosis of developmental or congenital prosopagnosia (CP) involves self-report of everyday face recognition difficulties, which are corroborated with poor performance on behavioural tests. This approach requires accurate self-evaluation. We examine the extent to which typical adults have insight into their face recognition abilities across four experiments involving nearly 300 participants. The experiments used five tests of face recognition ability: two that tap into the ability to learn and recognize previously unfamiliar faces [the Cambridge Face Memory Test, CFMT; Duchaine, B., & Nakayama, K. (2006). The Cambridge Face Memory Test: Results for neurologically intact individuals and an investigation of its validity using inverted face stimuli and prosopagnosic participants. Neuropsychologia, 44(4), 576–585. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2005.07.001; and a newly devised test based on the CFMT but where the study phases involve watching short movies rather than viewing static faces—the CFMT-Films] and three that tap face matching [Benton Facial Recognition Test, BFRT; Benton, A., Sivan, A., Hamsher, K., Varney, N., & Spreen, O. (1983). Contribution to neuropsychological assessment. New York: Oxford University Press; and two recently devised sequential face matching tests]. Self-reported ability was measured with the 15-item Kennerknecht et al. questionnaire [Kennerknecht, I., Ho, N. Y., & Wong, V. C. (2008). Prevalence of hereditary prosopagnosia (HPA) in Hong Kong Chinese population. American Journal of Medical Genetics Part A, 146A(22), 2863–2870. doi:10.1002/ajmg.a.32552]; two single-item questions assessing face recognition ability; and a new 77-item meta-cognition questionnaire. Overall, we find that adults with typical face recognition abilities have only modest insight into their ability to recognize faces on behavioural tests. In a fifth experiment, we assess self-reported face recognition ability in people with CP and find that some people who expect to perform poorly on behavioural tests of face recognition do indeed perform poorly. However, it is not yet clear whether individuals within this group of poor performers have greater levels of insight (i.e., into their degree of impairment) than those with more typical levels of performance.

Robust associations between the 20-item prosopagnosia index and the Cambridge Face Memory Test in the general population

“…asking participants to rate their face recognition ability ‘compared with the average person’) may not be a fruitful approach [19]. Nevertheless, we note that self-report scores elicited using abstract one-shot measures do correlate significantly with objective measures of face recognition ability [24,25,28]. Individuals with extremely good or extremely bad face recognition ability (so-called ‘super-recognizers’ [29] and DPs, respectively) are also more likely to encounter situations in their daily lives which illustrate that face recognition is a distributed ability, and suggest where they might fall within that distribution.…”

Face processing skills predict faithfulness of portraits drawn by novices

“…Neuroimaging, for example with voxel-based morphometry, could be used to determine whether individual differences observed here are reflected in face-sensitive cortical areas (Bukach et al, 2012), which are also recruited when people draw simple cartoon faces (Miall, Gowen, & Tchalenko, 2009). Our findings also point to a potential use for portrait drawing tasks in applied settings (i.e., forensic or recruitment situations in which good face processing skills are desirable) as an additional marker of skills, since people have poor insight into their face processing abilities (Palermo et al, 2017). To that end, future research might develop more automatic measures of faithfulness, for example algorithms that compute deviations between drawings and the model, instead of subjective ratings that might be more challenging to obtain.…”

Face Recognition Abilities in Iraqi Medical Students: An Inferential, Cross Sectional Analysis

“…Davis and colleagues suggested that prosopagnosia could be either developmental or acquired as a consequence of specific cortical neuronal damage (3,4). Overall, exploitation of super-recognizers is invaluable, particularly in lawenforcement and intelligence agencies (5)(6)(7)(8)(9).…”

“…These individuals are the exact opposite of people with a medical condition, known as "prosopagnosia" or "face blindness". In this condition, an individual has deteriorated or limited abilities to recognise faces (3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8)(9).…”