8/19/16

I’ve grown accustomed to your face…

Here’s a confession: All my life I’ve been bad at faces.  I could have a lovely conversation with you today and walk right past you tomorrow.  I'm not trying to be rude - I just don't recognize you.

www.crystalinks.com

This created special burdens when I was teaching. Even at the end of a 15-week semester, I would still have students I couldn’t recognize if I saw them outside of class. In class, I would ask them to sit in the same seats each week because I could attach names to places better than faces.  I was always grateful to have students with distinguishing features, like bright red hair or a big smile because they were easier to recognize.  There was one unfortunate statistics class full of attractive young women (i.e. regular features), with long brown hair.  They all looked the same to me.

For my close friends, there’s a specific “person-ness” to their faces that I can eventually rely on, but for many people I come across, that’s lacking.  If I see someone who gives me that micro-expression of recognition (the eyebrow flash), I always assume I’ve met them and respond accordingly.  Heaven forbid I have to introduce them to anyone else, though.

Here's the eyebrow flash:

Anyway, this is what it’s like to have a mild case of prosopagnosia or face blindness. I’m comparatively lucky. There are some people who are completely face blind.As one victim says: “It doesn’t matter if I know the person: I’ve walked right past my husband, my own mother, my daughter, my son, without being able to recognize them.” Some don't even recognize their own faces!

wikipedia

Your facial recognition software lies tucked up under the bottom of the temporal lobe of the brain, more on the right side than the left.  It helps you remember and recognize the faces of those you’ve met before. 

For some people, face blindness is the result of an injury, but there’s growing evidence that it can also be lifelong, like it is for me. What’s much more interesting is that the ability to recognize faces is actually on a continuum. Just as there are people who are really bad at it, there are people who are really good at it.  Really, really good.  And Scotland Yard has assembled them into a special team called super-recognizers.

London is covered by CCTV (closed circuit TV), more than almost anywhere else.  So it’s often that the Metropolitan Police have a face of a culprit but not a name.  That’s where the super-recognizers come in.  They can check a database of faces or the parts of town where the bad guy hangs out and look for a face they recognize.  And they’ve been amazingly successful.  Sometimes when all they see are the person's eyes! There’s a great story about them in the New Yorker. You can find it HERE. 

And here’s the test that researchers and Scotland Yard use to find super-recognizers.  Give it a try. Average is about 80%. The super-recognizers score near 100%.  I'm not talking about my score. Nope.

Cambridge Face Memory Test

NOTE:  It's a well recognized phenomenon that we are best at recognizing faces from our own ethnic or racial groups.  Scotland Yard's super recognizers are supplemented when needed with other officers from different ethnicities.

NOTE #2: If about 2% of the population have severe face blindness, that suggests that 2% of the TSA folks have the same problem because they don't screen for this.  TSA has 47,000 employees, so almost 1,000 can't recognize faces. At all. Some can't even tell if the face on the passport is the face they're looking at.  Think about that for awhile.