Some people say they never forget any face ever met; This statement has now been explained by psychologists at Harvard University. They have discovered a group of 'super-identifiers' who can easily recognize someone they have met in the past, even years ago.
New research suggests that face recognition skills vary widely from person to person. Previous studies have identified about 2% of our planet's inhabitants with 'blindness recognition' , also called prosopagnosia. This is a situation in which a person has a major difficulty in face recognition. For the first time in the scientific world, this new study shows that others excel in facial recognition, and describe this ability as a sequence, with blind people being able to identify at the low end and the person Super identification at the top .
The study is published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. Head of the research team is Richard Russell, a doctor in the Department of Physics at Harvard University; Co-authors are professors Ken Nakayama and Edgar Pierce of Oxford University School of Physics, and Brad Duchaine of University of London.
The study included standard face recognition tests. The results showed that the 'super-identifiers' scored higher than the average.
'The default hypothesis suggests that there are two states: one is the ability to identify normally, the other is the recognition disorder,' Russel said . 'This study concludes that in fact it is not - there is a chain that includes many different levels of ability. It shows a completely different model - a new way of looking at faces, and possibly other aspects of awareness. The new study recognizes the ability to identify a sequence with many different levels, not just the normal and the disorder levels. '
People who are 'metacognition' say they often recognize others but rarely recognize others. For this reason, Russell said, they often deliberately pretended not to recognize some of the people they had met, to avoid being considered too important to flee meetings.
'The person with the ability to identify has a lot of interesting stories around recognizing others,' Russel said. 'For example, they even recognize people who have been shopping at a store two months earlier, even though they never talked to that person. This is not necessarily a special encounter, they simply have that ability - remember those who are not important. '
One woman in the study said that when she was on the street she had noticed another woman who had served as a waitress in another city. Sure, she asserted that the woman was actually a waiter who had served her in that city. Often, metacognitive people can recognize others regardless of major changes in appearance, such as age or hair color.
If the ability to identify faces is different for each person, it is important to assess the level of trust of a witness in a case, or in an interview when recruiting a number of people. job placement, such as security guard or ID card reader.
Russel theorized that it is not until today that people are interested in the ability to identify and blind the ability to identify, the reason is because our community is now different from the people of the past. thousand years ago.
'Previously, most people lived in smaller communities, with less frequent interaction in the community,' Russel said. 'Even today there is a new need in society - the need to remember and recognize many people.'
The research was supported by the US National Institute of Ophthalmology and the British Society for Economic and Social Research.