The consistency of superior face recognition skills in police officers

Sarah Bate,Gavin Dudfield,Emma Portch,Charlie Frowd,Rachel Bennetts,Nabil Hasshim,Ebony Murray

doi:10.1002/acp.3525

Abstract

SummaryIn recent years, there has been increasing interest in people with superior face recognition skills. Yet identification of these individuals has mostly relied on criterion performance on a single attempt at a single measure of face memory. The current investigation aimed to examine the consistency of superior face recognition skills in 30 police officers, both across tests that tap into the same process and between tests that tap into different components of face processing. Overall indices of performance across related measures were found to identify different superior performers to isolated test scores. Further, different top performers emerged for target‐present versus target‐absent indices, suggesting that signal detection measures are the most useful indicators of performance. Finally, a dissociation was observed between superior memory and matching performance. Super‐recognizer screening programmes hould therefore include overall indices summarizing multiple attempts at related tests, allowing for individuals to rank highly on different (and sometimes very specific) tasks.

Highlights

In the last decade, there has been growing interest in so‐called “super‐ recognizers” (SRs): people with an extraordinary ability to recognize faces (Bobak, Hancock, & Bate, 2016; Robertson, Noyes, Dowsett, Jenkins, & Burton, 2016; Russell, Duchaine, & Nakayama, 2009)
The extended version of the Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT+; Russell et al, 2009) is currently the dominant test used to detect super recognition, and the sole inclusion criterion used in many papers is a single attempt at this test where the score exceeds control performance by at least two standard deviations
The current study aimed to examine the consistency of superior face recognition skills both across tests that tap into the same process and between tests that assess different processes

Summary

Introduction

There has been growing interest in so‐called “super‐ recognizers” (SRs): people with an extraordinary ability to recognize faces (Bobak, Hancock, & Bate, 2016; Robertson, Noyes, Dowsett, Jenkins, & Burton, 2016; Russell, Duchaine, & Nakayama, 2009). The published literature lacks any large‐scale investigations into the consistency of superior face recognition skills either within or across tasks, with most studies merely requiring performance at an arbitrary level on a single task for inclusion in an SR sample (see Bate et al, 2018). It is unknown whether individuals with genuine proficiencies are being detected: This draws existing theoretical work into potential disregard and has implications for the performance of SRs in real‐world settings.

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Conclusion