The science behind people who never forget a face

Teaching AI to see faces like humans reveals what makes expert eyes so effective, new research shows.

What is it that makes a super recogniser – someone with extraordinary face recognition abilities – better at remembering faces than the rest of us?

According to new research carried out by cognitive scientists at UNSW Sydney, it’s not how much of a face they can take in – it comes down to the quality of the information their eyes focus on.

“Super-recognisers don’t just look harder, they look smarter. They choose the most useful parts of a face to take in,” says Dr James Dunn, lead author on the research that published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

“They’re not actually seeing more, instead, their eyes naturally look at the parts of a face that carry the best clues for telling one person from another.”

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This article is interesting but leaves out the fact that facial recognition takes place in a small part of the brain which works wholistically with faces; that is, it is able to grasp an entire face as a whole.

People who are good at face recognition have good brains in this area. People who are bad at it have not-so-good brains in this area.

Interestingly, this area of the brain is close to our orthographic area, the area where written words and graphic signs are identified or produced.

And the two areas can borrow real estate from each other.

One result of this is some people when learning how to read and write can lose some of their face-recognition abilities, to make room for the orthography.

Here are a couple of related articles, focusing on face-blindness. Face-blindness (memory) test and Prosopagnosia — ‘face-blindness’ — described.

Facial recognition is interesting and plays a major role in our social and subjective sense of how we function.

Everybody is somewhere on the spectrum of good-to-bad facial recognition skills.

As the article above states, correctly, you cannot train yourself to be better at face-recognition (because it is a wholistic skill ensconced in the architecture of the brain).

Many people with poor facial recognition skills are not aware of their deficit.

It’s a good idea to take one or two of the free online tests for prosopagnosia, the clinical word for face-blindness.

If you are good at it, you are probably pretty good socially.

If not, you may have a social deficit whose origin you were not aware of.

I took a couple of those tests some years ago and thought they were ridiculous because there is no way, I thought, anyone could do it.

Even after that it took me a few more years to recognize I really suck at recognizing faces.

Parents and teachers should be aware that some of the children they are dealing with may be very intelligent but also very bad a face-recognition.

Oliver Sacks and Brad Pitt both have prosopagnosia, so the company is not so bad. ABN