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Faces can be Remembered from Image Fragments by Good Face Recognizers

Faces can be Remembered from Image Fragments by Good Face Recognizers

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People who excel at face recognition, break new faces into component elements before storing them as composite images in the brain.

Highlights:
  • It was believed that to remember a face well, an individual must process the face holistically
  • Psychologists contested this belief and found that super-recognisers can recognise faces better than others even when they only see smaller portions of the face at a time
The common belief that people with extraordinary facial recognition abilities, rely on processing faces holistically has been contested by psychologists at UNSW Sydney and University of Wollongong.
They concluded that individuals who excel at learning and remembering new faces- also referred to as super recognisers- can break new faces down into component elements before storing them as composite images in the brain.

“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. 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,” said lead researcher, Dr James Dunn.

The researchers tested super recognisers and individuals with average face recognition skills. They wanted to determine whether revealing only small portions of a face at a time affected super recognisers’ superior capacity to remember a face. Their findings were published in the journal Psychological Science.

Super recognisers continued to perform better when only viewing small portions of a face at once. They also appeared to look away from the eyes more frequently than other test subjects.

However, according to Dr Dunn, the findings do not necessarily imply that super-recognizers act any differently from 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.”


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Studying Face Recognition

37 super-recognizers and 68 normal recognisers were chosen by the researchers. They were seated in front of a computer screen. There, using eye tracking equipment, they observed faces through a ‘spotlight' that could capture up to 60% of the face at its biggest aperture and as little as 12% at its smallest.

Only the areas of the face that their eyes lighted were exposed in clarity, with the remainder being blurred beyond identification, as everyone had five seconds to examine a face’s outline. As they turned their gaze to the sides of the face, fresh features emerged while the previous portion of the face was once more hidden. They examined a total of twelve faces.

The participants were asked to identify the faces they had seen in the face learning phase after being shown 24 faces, including the 12 they had seen in the first half of the test and 12 new faces.


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Beautiful people

Whether the aperture was huge or very small, it showed out that super-recognisers were more accurate than regular recognisers. While the traits that super-recognisers looked at differed from what regular recognisers looked at in a predictable way, there was a difference in the amount of time that they spent gazing at the eyes.

“We found that they look at the eyes less. This is even though 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 results of the study, according to the researchers, alter how we perceive the reasons why some people are more adept at remembering faces than others.

“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.”


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Additional Superpowers of Super-recognizers

Do super-recognizers also excel in jobs requiring pattern matching, phone number memory, or photographic memory?

Dr Dunn noted that although it wasn’t the focus of this study, a recent study published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review found that people who are adept at comparing images of people’s faces- for example, comparing a person’s face to their driver’s licence photo- may also be adept at comparing other kinds 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.

In the future, Dr Dunn and his other researchers hope to bring super-recognizing into the real world. Super-recognizers will wear specialised eye-tracking spectacles that capture what their eyes are doing as they walk around and engage with others.

"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.”

Source-Medindia


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