Super-Recognizers: More Consistent or Qualitatively Different Psychophysical Profiles?

Abstract

Facial identity matching ability varies widely, ranging from severely deficient prosopagnosics (who exhibit profound impairments in face cognition) to so-called Super-Recognizers (SRs), possessing exceptional capacities for processing facial identity. Yet, despite the often consequential nature of face matching decisions—such as identity verification in security critical settings—ability assessments rely on simple performance metrics on a handful of heterogeneously related subprocesses, or in some cases only a single measured subprocess. Unfortunately, methodologies of this ilk leave contributions of stimulus information to observed variations in ability largely unspecified. Moreover, they are inadequate for addressing the qualitative or quantitative nature of differences between SRs’ abilities and those of the general population. Here, therefore, we sought to investigate individual differences—among SRs identified using a novel conservative diagnostic framework, and neurotypical controls—by systematically varying retinal availability, bandwidth, and orientation of faces’ spatial frequency content over two face matching experiments. Psychophysical evaluations of these parameters’ contributions to ability reveal that SRs more consistently exploit the same spatial frequency information, rather than suggesting qualitatively different profiles between normal observers and SRs. These findings stress the importance of optimizing procedures for SR diagnosis to include measures of individuals’ consistency.