The unlikely key to making facial recognition work: Human 'super-recognizers'

The unlikely key to making facial recognition work: Human 'super-recognizers'

5 years ago
Anonymous $Dftgs0JzgE

https://www.cnet.com/news/the-unlikely-key-to-making-facial-recognition-work-human-super-recognizers/

You might recognize your neighbors if you glimpsed them in an unfamiliar context, but you might not have the observational skills to identify a hooded figure in a blurry video as the same person who sat opposite you on the train last week. A small handful of people can, though, and this is what separates super-recognizers from the rest of us.

The drawback is the scarcity of people who qualify as super-recognizers. The ability to recognize an extraordinary number of faces is a cognitive quirk first identified by researchers at Harvard University and University College London in 2009, and one that's thought to affect only 2 percent of the population. There's nothing you can do to teach yourself this skill, according to Josh Davis, a reader in applied psychology at the University of Greenwich who studies super-recognizers. You're either born with it or you aren't. (There's even an online test you can take.)