Cognitive and neural markers of super-recognisers’ face processing superiority and enhanced cross-age effect

Abstract

Super-recognisers inhabit the extreme high end of an adult face processing ability spectrum in the population. While almost all research in this area has evaluated those with poor or mid-range abilities, evaluating whether super-recognisers' superiority generates distinct electrophysiological brain activity, and transcends to different age group faces (i.e., children's) is important for enhancing theoretical understanding of normal and impaired face processing. It may also be crucial for policing, as super-recognisers may be deployed to operations involving child identification and protection. In Experiment 1, super-recognisers (n = 315) outperformed controls (n = 499) at adult and infant face recognition, while also displaying larger cross-age effects. These findings were replicated in Experiment 2 (super-recognisers, n = 19; controls, n = 28), although one SR with frequent infant exposure showed no cross-age effect. Compared to controls, super-recognisers also generated significantly greater electrophysiological activity in event-related potentials associated with pictorial processing (P1) and explicit recognition (P600). Experiment 3, employing an upright and inverted sequential matching design found super-recognisers (n = 24) outperformed controls (n = 20) at adult and infant face matching, but showed no upright cross-age matching effects. Instead, they displayed larger inversion effects, and cross-age inversion effects, implicating the role of holistic processing in their perceptual superiority. Larger cross-age effects in recognition, but not matching suggests that super-recognisers' adult face recognition is partly driven by experience. However, their enhanced infant face recognition suggest super-recognisers' superiority is also experience-independent, results that have implications for policing and for models of face recognition.

Super‐recognizers: From the lab to the world and back again

“… AFRT (Adults Face Recognition Test, Belanvova et al., ); BORB (Birmingham Object Recognition Battery, Humphreys & Riddoch, 1993); BTWF (Before They Were Famous, Russell et al., ); CBT (Change Blindness Test, Smart et al., 2014); CCMT (Cambridge Car Memory Test; Dennett et al., 2011); CFE (Composite Face Effect Robbins & McKone, ); CFMT+ (Cambridge Face Memory Test Long Form; Russell et al., ); CFPT (Cambridge Face Perception Test; Duchaine et al., ); CMT (Crowd Matching Test; Bate et al., ); Ekman 60 (Ekman 60 faces test; Young et al., ); FFRT (Famous Face Recognition Test; Lander et al., ); GFMT (Glasgow Face Matching Test; Burton et al., ); Global Bias Index (Navon, ); IE (Inversion Effect); IFRT (Infant Face Recognition Test, Belanova et al., ) IPIP (International Personality Item Pool Representation of the NEO PI‐R™; Goldberg, 1998); MFMT (Models Face Matching Test; Dowsett & Burton, ); MMT (Models Matching Test, Bate et al., ); NASA‐TLI (National Aeronautics and Space Administration Task Load Index Hart & Staveland, ); Old/New UFMT (Old/New Unfamiliar Memory Test, Davis et al., ); SFCT (Spotting Face in a Crowd Test, Davis et al., ); PFPB (Philadelphia Face Perception Battery; Thomas et al., ); PLT (Pixelated Lookalike Test; Robertson et al., ); PMT (Pairs Matching Test; Bate et al., ); RMITE (Reading the Mind in The Eyes; Baron Cohen et al., ); SIAS (Social Interaction Anxiety Scale, Mattick & Clarke, ); SMT (Sequential Matching Task); STAI‐T (State Trait Anxiety Inventory‐ Trait; Spielberger et al., ); WASI (Wechsler abbreviated Scale of Intelligence; Wechsler ); WTAR (Wechsler Test of Adult Reading; Holdnack, ). …”

Reduced perceptual narrowing in synesthesia

“…This pattern challenges current notions of the development of perceptual expertise and suggests that the improvements for native stimuli may occur independently of the decrements for nonnative stimuli. Such independence has been shown for superrecognizers, whose superiority for the native category (adult own race upright faces) co-occurs with superior processing of infants' faces (45) and other races' faces (46). In adults with synesthesia, connections underlying the discrimination of items from native categories might have been strengthened by the normal consolidation of experienced categories without the full complementary pruning of inexperienced ones.…”

“…Similarly, the independence of tuning in to native categories and of tuning out of nonnative categories is evident in human adults labeled superrecognizers because of their extraordinary ability to recognize facial identity for native categories (e.g., adults, same race, upright). They are also superior at recognizing faces from rarely experienced categories, namely infants' faces (45) and other races' faces (46), with no correlation among these abilities.…”

Assessing the long-term face memory of highly superior and typical-ability short-term face recognisers

“…As with other online face recognition research that tends to attract far greater numbers of superior performers than in student-participant-dominated laboratory-typical (e.g., Belanova, Davis, & Thompson, 2018;Satchell, Davis, Julle-Danière, Tupper, & Marshman, 2019), a large proportion of participants in the current research achieved SR criteria. Many more scored slightly below our SR threshold, while only a few scored below the typical CFMT+ (Russell et al, 2009) control mean in research.…”