Mirta Stantić, Zoë Pounder, Sarah Bate, Caroline Catmur, & Geoff Bird
Some people are far better than others at recognising faces. These people are called super recognisers. Scientists want to know why they are so good. Usual tests mix together different skills, like noticing details in a face, remembering faces, and deciding if two faces are the same. This makes it hard to know which skill matters most.
A new test, the Oxford Face Matching Test (OFMT), can separate these skills. It has already been used to study people with autism and people who find faces very hard to recognise (prosopagnosia). In these studies, autistic people often have reasonable face matching skills, but sometimes find face memory and face perception harder. Those with prosopagnosia find all three skills hard.
The study involved 64 people, of whom half were super recognisers and half were not, matched by age and gender. Participants completed three tests online: the Cambridge Face Memory Test (remembering faces), the Glasgow Face Matching Test (deciding if two faces are the same), and the Oxford Face Matching Test (judging how similar two faces look and whether they are the same person). Using analysis originally used to investigate the independent contributions of face perception, matching and memory in autism, researchers could see which skills super recognisers were strongest in.
As expected, super recognisers are better at face perception, face matching, and face memory compared to other participants.
This supports the idea that super recognisers are at the opposite end of a spectrum from people with prosopagnosia, who struggle with face memory, matching, and perception. However, not all super recognisers are the same: some are excellent across all skills, while others are mainly strong in memory but not as strong in matching or perception. This matters because super recognisers are sometimes used in jobs like police work, and not every person with this label will be equally good at all face-related tasks. Super recognisers are a varied group, and future research should test all three skills separately to understand their strengths more clearly.