Face in the crowd
University of New South Wales
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| I think I'd recognize him |
Instead,
they argue, people who are great at learning and remembering new faces -- also
known as super recognisers -- can divide new faces into parts, before storing
them in the brain as composite images.
"It's
been a long-held belief that to remember a face well you need to have a global
impression of the face, basically by looking at the centre and seeing the face
as a whole," said lead researcher, Dr James Dunn.
"But
our research shows that super-recognisers are still able to recognise faces
better than others even when they can only see smaller regions at a time. This
suggests that they can piece together an overall impression from smaller
chunks, rather than from a holistic impression taken in a single glance."
In
a paper published today in the journal Psychological Science, the
researchers described how they set up an experiment that tested both super
recognisers and people with average face recognition skills to see whether
revealing only small areas of a face at a time made any difference to super recognisers'
superior ability to remember a face.
Not
only did super recognisers continue to perform better when only seeing small
parts of a face at a time, but they seemed to spend less time looking at the
eyes than other participants in the test.
But
according to Dr Dunn, the results don't mean that super-recognisers are
necessarily doing anything differently than the rest of us.
"It
seems that super-recognisers are not processing faces in a qualitatively
different way from everyone else," Dr Dunn said. "They are doing
similar things to normal people, but they are doing some important things more
and this leads to better accuracy."
The setup
The
researchers recruited 37 super-recognisers and 68 typical recognisers and sat
them before a computer screen. There, they looked at faces through a
'spotlight' that captured up to 60 per cent of the face at the largest
aperture, down to just 12 per cent at the smallest aperture, using eye tracking
technology.
Each
person had five seconds to scan an outline of a face, and only the parts of the
face that their gaze illuminated was revealed in detail, with the rest blurred
beyond recognition. As they looked around the face, new details of the face
were revealed, while the preceding area was again obscured. They looked at a
total of 12 faces.
In
the next phase they were presented with 24 faces -- the 12 that they had viewed
in the first part of the test, and 12 new faces -- and asked to identify the
faces they had seen in the face learning phase.
Good
lookers
It
turned out that the super-recognisers were more accurate than typical
recognisers whether the size of the aperture was large or very small. While
there didn't seem to be a pattern in the features that super-recognisers gazed
at compared to typical recognisers, there was a difference in the time that
they spent looking at the eyes.
"We
found that they actually look at the eyes less. This is despite the fact that a
lot of research has been saying that looking at the eyes is such an important
part of recognition and that the eyes do contain visual information that can
give away a person's identity.
"So
this was a bit of a mystery. One theory we have is that looking away from the
eyes creates the opportunity to extract identity information from other
features."
The
researchers said their experiment changes the way we think about why some
people are better than others at committing a face to memory.
"We
think one of the things they're doing uniquely is exploring the face more to
find information that is useful for remembering or recognising a person later.
So when super-recognisers learn a face, it is more like putting together pieces
in a jigsaw puzzle than taking a single snapshot of the whole face."
Other
superpowers?
So
are super-recognisers good at other tasks, like matching patterns, remembering
phone numbers, or having photographic memories?
While
that wasn't a subject of this particular study, Dr Dunn said that in another
study recently published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Reviewthey
found that those who are good at comparing images of people's faces -- like
comparing someone's face to their driver's licence photo -- may also be good at
comparing other types of visual patterns.
"We
are starting to find evidence from super-recognisers and the public that people
who were accurate when matching photographs of faces also tended to be more
accurate matching other types of visual patterns, like the fingerprint and
firearm samples that are analysed by forensic scientists.
"This
leads us to believe that there is a general ability to compare complex visual
patterns that is shared across different objects, which means that the same
skills that make someone good at matching faces may also help you compare these
other patterns as well," he said.
Looking
ahead, Dr Dunn and his fellow researchers are keen to take super-recognising
out of the lab and into the real world. They plan to have super-recognisers
wear special eye-tracking glasses that record what their eyes are doing as they
move about in the world and interact with people.
"We'd
like to see whether some of the things we've observed in the lab about how
super-recognisers learn and remember faces are the same in their day-to-day
life."
The
super-recognisers who were part of the study were selected after performing
strongly in the online UNSW Face
Test.
Story
Source:
Materials provided by University of New South Wales. Original written by Lachlan Gilbert.