Some people really 'never forget a face'

SOME people say they never forget a face, a claim now bolstered by psychologists at Harvard University who’ve discovered a group they call “super-recognisers”: those who can easily recognise someone they met in passing, even many years later.
The new study suggests that skill in facial recognition might vary widely among humans. Previous research has identified as much as 2 percent of the population as having “face-blindness,” or prosopagnosia, a condition characterized by great difficulty in recognising faces. For the first time, this new research shows that others excel in face recognition, indicating that the trait could be on a spectrum, with prosopagnosics on the low end and super-recognisers at the high end.
The research is published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, and was led by Richard Russell, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychology at Harvard, with co-authors Ken Nakayama, Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard, and Brad Duchaine of the University College London.
The research involved administering standardized face recognition tests. The super-recognisers scored far above average on these tests-higher than any of the normal control subjects.
“There has been a default assumption that there is either normal face recognition, or there is disordered face recognition,” says Russell. “This suggests that’s not the case, that there is actually a very wide range of ability. It suggests a different model-a different way of thinking about face recognition ability, and possibly even other aspects of perception, in terms of a spectrum of abilities, rather than there being normal and disordered ability.”
Super-recognisers report that they recognise other people far more often than they are recognised. For this reason, says Russell, they often compensate by pretending not to recognise someone they met in passing, so as to avoid appearing to attribute undue importance to a fleeting encounter. – SD