Facial Recognition & Super Recognisers / Recognizers

[Trevp666]

I used to know someone with what I called 'extreme vision'......she could clearly identify things by sight alone from a long distance, even recognising people who (to anyone else) were merely specks in the distance. It was like she had a zoom lens on her eyes.

 

[Meechyemoo]

Thinking about my 'super recogniser' score, I do constantly annoy entertain Mr Zebra when we're watching old films because I'm always saying "ooh that's so-and-so from other film" and such like.

Sometimes it takes me a while until I can place the actor/actress though, and that really bugs me until I can figure it out.


Conversely though, on some shows like Midsomer Murders or Marple etc., I often get confused because a lot of the male characters look the same and I can't follow who is who.

I watched Traces on BBC this week and thought the Detective and the main suspect were very similar, but the main suspect had better hair!

 

[bugmum]

I'm quite good with faces, which used to be handy when I was teaching. The Teenager claims to be terrible, and often asks me how I remember random people whom I nod and smile at in Tesco's.

Having said that, we were up by the freezer section tonight and a masked woman looked up, caught my eye and made a nodding "hi, how are you?' motion, which I automatically returned although I didn't instantly recognise her. Having thought about it, it may have been a former lab technician from our floor who moved on a couple of years ago. This woman was wearing the dark red trousers that the local hospital phlebotomists wear, and that might have thrown me off the scent as I don't think the lab tech went to the hospital - I thought she went to the local Environment Agency gaff. My other excuse is that masks do make it harder to spot acquaintances!

 

[EnolaGaia]

This Guardian article describes one super recognizer's background and experience.

‘I’d keep it on the down low’: the secret life of a super-recogniser

Police employ them and scientists study them, but what is life like for the rare few who can never forget a face? Super-recogniser Yenny Seo didn’t think it was anything special

As a child, Yenny Seo often surprised her mother by pointing out a stranger in the grocery store, remarking it was the same person they passed on the street a few weeks earlier. Likewise, when they watched a movie together, Seo would often recognise “extras” who’d appeared fleetingly in other films.

Her mother never thought this was “anything special”, Seo says, and simply assumed she had a particularly observant daughter.

Seo too was unaware that others didn’t share her love of the private game she played, where she’d spot a person on a bus or the street and then flick through the vast catalogue of faces she kept in her head, trying to place where she’d seen them before. ...

It was only as she got older and started using social media that Seo became self-conscious of her skill. “I would start a new class in uni or I would meet people through social gatherings and I would remember visually what kind of photos I’d seen them in. I’d already be so familiar with them ... ” she says.

“But I also knew it’d be really creepy if I said that out loud, so I’d keep it on the down low and just say: ‘Oh, nice to meet you.’” ...

Until the early 2000s, little scientific attention was paid to whether all humans possess the same ability to recognise faces. According to Dr David White, ... “I think intuitively people believe that the way they see the world is the same as others. ...”

White first became interested in the field while studying a rare condition called prosopagnosia – when a brain injury leaves someone unable to recognise faces. ...

Along with other researchers, White started examining people without brain injury, discovering there is “tremendous variation” in facial recognition ability. At the very upper end of the performance scale, a cohort of just 1-2% of the population are “super-recognisers” – people who can memorise and recall unfamiliar faces, even after the briefest glimpse. ...

The underlying cause is still not entirely clear – it’s a new field, with only around 20 scientific papers studying super-recognisers. However, it is suspected genetics plays a role because identical twins show similar performance, and it has been shown that cortical thickness – the amount of neurons – in the part of the brain that supports face recognition is a predictor of superior ability. ...

Over the past decade, security and law enforcement agencies around the world have started recruiting people with superior facial recognition capabilities. ... A proliferation of private agencies has also sprung up, offering the services of super-recognisers. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.theguardian.com/society...own-low-the-secret-life-of-a-super-recogniser