
'Super Recognizers' Like Me - aaron695
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ep487p/how-police-are-using-super-recognizers-like-me-to-track-criminals
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austinkhale
The article reads a lot like a PR piece. The 100% accuracy claim in particular
seems... unlikely.

~~~
sdenton4
Forensics loves junk science...

[https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/the-wear-patterns-
of...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/the-wear-patterns-of-your-
jeans-arent-good-forensic-evidence/)

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JackMorgan
I'm certain I have the ability to super recognize people from audio and smell,
but not visual. I'm very nearly face blind, and can hardly remember close
people's faces. Usually I can detect a voice actor from a single spoken word,
or which co-worker walked down a given hall just from sense of smell.

The audio one is hard to explain, almost like I can visualize their voice
thumbprint, hearing each aspect of intonation, syllable spacing, and cadence.
It's so clear I can often see it matching over other words by the same person.
Rarely an actor might put on an accent good enough I don't "recognize" them,
and it's deeply unsettling, like an acustic uncanny valley, hearing the wrong
voice on top of a face.

I went without glasses for almost six months when I was little before my
parents realized, so I've always wondered if my audio and olfactory centers
just overdeveloped.

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saeranv
I've been fascinated by the mechanisms behind human facial recognition ever
since I read Peter Watts 'Blindsight'. Near the end he introduces an idea
similar to the Chernoff face[1], plots of multivariate data in the shape of a
human face. The idea is that humans are so keyed into recognizing subtle
nuances in facial expressions, we're better at interpreting mulitvariate data
graphed as a facial expression. Some interesting parts from this interview:

\- She surprisingly claims that she's not good at recognizing emotions.

\- She can recognize adults based on how they looked as children. This
suggests there's a sort of 'fuzzing' process that allows her to interpolate
aging.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernoff_face](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernoff_face)

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tzs
I remember listening to something on my local public radio station (KUOW)
once, I'd guess on "This American Life" or "Hidden Brain" but I'm not sure,
about extremes of human memory and related things.

They talked about two people who were at opposite ends of facial memory
ability. There was a woman who had total face blindness. She could tell she
was looking at a face, but could not recall who it belonged to.

If you had her boyfriend walk out of the room she was in, and then come back
in with a couple other people dressed the same as him, she could not tell by
sight which one was her boyfriend.

The other person had perfect facial memory. For example, if some random
stranger at an airport asked him what time it was, and then ten years later he
was introduced to that same person at, say, a party, he'd recognize instantly
that they asked him the time ten years ago at the airport.

They say opposites attract, and in this case there was some truth to that--the
man with perfect facial memory was also the boyfriend of the woman with total
face blindness.

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IIAOPSW
Any mechanism (biological or otherwise) for seeing patterns in limited
information is sure to also see a lot of erroneous patterns. Furthermore if
one part of the brain is often seeing patterns that aren't there, other parts
of the brain are likely doing the same. For this reason, I wonder if being a
'super recognizer' is correlated with schizophrenia.

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keenmaster
>seeing patterns in limited information is sure to also see a lot of erroneous
patterns

I don't think that the brain uses general pattern recognition on faces, but
rather a distinct and specialized facial processing module. Without reading
more about super-recognizers, my guess is that their facial processing module
is OP. These people will never forget or confuse a face in the same way that
you will basically never confuse your mom for someone else, except for a split
second in edge cases. We don't worry about confusing our mom for someone else.

~~~
dmd
How much of that is context, though? I certainly wouldn't (and haven't)
recognize my mom or my wife or anyone else, really, in the wrong context when
I wasn't expecting to see them.

~~~
keenmaster
That's fascinating. It sounds like you might be in the minority. I don't think
I'm particularly good at recognizing faces, but I've recognized several old
acquaintances among many passerby in a big city. I don't even have to look at
them directly - sometimes my "spidey sense" kicks in when they enter my
peripheral vision.

~~~
keenmaster
Edit: I took the test and it said that I am probably a super recognizer. I
didn't think it was likely since only 2% of people have the ability, but maybe
I extrapolated too much from me not remembering names as much as I'd like to.

I'd still be surprised if the average person can't quickly recognize their mom
out of context.

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nayuki
I first heard of the concept of super-recognizers from this documentary video
from Australia:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6AVF0GhxNk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6AVF0GhxNk)
"Passport Problem | Testing out fake passport | Tricking passport scanner"

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w_for_wumbo
They didn't answer the question that I wanted to know, what about identical
twins, can she distinguish between them?

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latortuga
I'm sure they can. I grew up with identical twin mother and aunt and while
many people regularly mixed them up, I never had an issue. I always thought it
was quite obvious. So my suspicion is that whatever it is that I could see due
to familiarity, is likely what super recognizers can see immediately.

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setr
Ditto; I had a couple friends that were identical friends, and it only took a
few days of interaction I think to start consistently differentiating them --
and I have terrible memory of people.

They're identical for the most part, but there's always obvious cues; how they
walk, different expressions/reactions, different tones when talking, slightly
different slang, etc. It's like a deterministic lockstep game that
desynchronized when they were born -- the desync slowly but surely cascades.

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RickJWagner
Amazing!

I fear I have the opposite. I try really hard, but I can't remember faces or
especially names. Until I really get to know someone, I'm not quite certain
who I'm dealing with. It's a curse.

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lawlessone
I passed some university test for this "superpower" a few years ago.

A lot of it was just recognising faces they'd previously shown me from very
fuzzy images.

Overall i got the impression they wanted insight into training an AI.

I still get the odd email asking me to participate , in more studies (i did
one or two more)but i ignore them now because of the above, and it's an
unrewarding time sink.

It was actually the same test that is linked in the article and here.

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airstrike
Amazing skill. Congrats and all but do color me scared.

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riffic
It's not skill, it's pure woo. I'm not impressed.

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jsemrau
Reminds me of William Gibsons Iduro's Colin Laney. Likely we will see more of
these newly type of jobs going forward.

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aaron695
I think John le Carre had a character who did this?

An older women who worked admin for MI6 and did all the unknown id's.

It might be been a different author. But it was written in the 90's at the
latest.

~~~
aaron695
"It is the almost hilarious case, but perfectly true, that while the CIA
"cousins" use banks of computers in which are stored millions and millions of
facial features to try to match up the incoming daily flow of photographs,
Britain uses Blodwyn.

An elderly and often ill-used lady, forever harassed by her younger male
colleagues for a quick identification, Blodwyn has been in the job forty years
and works underneath Sentinel House, where she presides over the huge archive
of pictures that make up MI6's "mug book." Not a book at all, it is in fact a
cavernous vault where are stored rows and rows of volumes of photographs, of
which Blodwyn alone possesses an encyclopedic knowledge.

Her mind is something like the CIA's computer bank, which she can occasionally
defeat. In her memory is stored not the tiniest detail of the Thirty Years'
War or even the Wall Street stock prices; her mind stores faces. Shapes of
noses, lines of jaws, casts of eyes; the sag of a cheek, the curve of a lip,
the way a glass or cigarette is held, the glint of a capped tooth in a smile
taken in an Australian pub and showing up years later in a London supermarket
--all are grist to the mill of her remarkable memory."

(The Fourth Protocol, Frederick Forsyth, 1984.)

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autarch
There's a test linked to see if you might be a super recognizer. It only used
Caucasian faces. Insert epic facepalm here.

~~~
bagels
[https://greenwichuniversity.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_e3x...](https://greenwichuniversity.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_e3xDuCccGAdgbfT?Source=Website)

So you don't have to hunt for it too.

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axaxs
Did you do the test? It seemed very basic and simple, to me. I got 13/14 which
it says 'may be a superrecognizer', but I definitely don't think I am, so
assume the test isn't much good. Curious to know how others fare.

~~~
bloak
I tested everyone in my family with an online test of facial recognition
(probably it was
[https://facetest.psy.unsw.edu.au/](https://facetest.psy.unsw.edu.au/)). The
results from the online test did not correlate with our real-life experience:
a person who is very bad at recognising people in real life got a slightly
better score on the online test than a person who is very good at recognising
people in real life.

