Super Recognizers

We've talked before about prosopagnosia, the condition also known as face blindness. People who have it lack the normal human ability to recognize other people visually. The example I always think of is Oliver Sacks, the late great writer on neurology. When Dr. Sacks would go to a restaurant to meet his assistant of ten years for lunch, she had to raise her hand so he'd know which table she was at—he couldn't recognize her.

Turns out there's an opposite condition—a small number of people are so-called "super recognizers," sometimes used by police departments to identify faces in difficult conditions. They have the ability to recognize abnormally large numbers of people from clues and levels of familiarity too subtle for most of us. Even with the burgeoning use of face-detection technology for many uses (some legitimate, some worrying), "you always need someone at the end to confirm it," said Kenny Long, a former super recognizer with the London Metropolitan Police, as quoted in this article at c|net.

Back in photo-land, many Sony cameras (and maybe other brands, I don't know) have also become "super recognizers" of a sort. The feature first called Face Detection and more recently known as Eye Autofocus (Eye AF), has developed to a remarkable degree in recent models such as the super-speedy Sony A9. Here's a Sony page giving instructions for using eye autofocus in many Sony cameras. I saw a video that "tested" or demonstrated eye AF with the Sony A7rIII that impressed me a lot—in one situation, Stuart James was able to shoot a model through foliage and the camera zeroed right in on the model's eyes, where most cameras' AF would have been fooled. I'd think it would be a feature of great interest to dedicated portraitists and fashion photographers.

Dr. Sacks' book that includes his reflections on seeing and visual perception, and in which he discusses his prosopagnosia, is called Mind's Eye. Dr. Sacks was portrayed by Robin Williams in the remarkable movie Awakenings with Robert De Niro.

Mike

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(Not) everything must fade away

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Joe Holmes: "My son apparently has mild prosopagnosia—to this day he rarely greets anyone by name, thanks to the odds that he's wrong or simply doesn't know if he's ever met them before. But it seems that the genes he lacks all accumulated in my daughter, who may be a super-recognizer. She'll spot a minor actor from a film she saw one time years earlier, and she's always right. It's like perfect pitch in a way."

(A regular reader and commenter): "I did an online test a few years ago that strongly suggested I am a super-recogniser. It's something I've always known I am significantly better than average at, and it has occasionally led to almost a precognitive experience where I know I am going to bump into someone in a few moments because, in fact, I've already seen them subconsciously in a crowd or at a distance out of the corner of my eye.

"But for me at least there appears to be something of a downside.

"I know of people who say they can, perhaps in times of stress when they need something to think about, imagine the face of a parent or friend and focus on it, hold it in their mind's eye, etc. I can't really do that. It's as if I am seeing stars at night but they disappear as soon as I look directly at them instead of out of the corner of my eye, or I am trying to hold too many marbles at once: I can't assemble the whole face in a way that is really stable, before it is lost. I know what they look like, and I can probably describe them bit by bit, but I cannot hold a still picture at all.

"I can visualise little parts of that face—a smile, or eyes—for much longer periods of time, and as a result I seem to have learned a way to visualise people through their likely reaction to some news or a joke, and I remember interactions and emotions (in conjunction with my own). So I have to evoke little mental vignettes; I have strong emotional memories and I often describe people that way.

"As an aside, I'm also almost totally unable to remember someone's younger face if I know them as an older person. I'm not sure how uncommon that is.

"I'm not sure if this form of 'aphantasia' and super-recognising go together, or indeed whether my ability to imagine a face is really abnormally bad, but I do know which ability I'd prefer to have!"

Mike replies: That's very interesting. I might be something like the opposite of you. I'd say I'm on the low side of average when it comes to recognizing people. I even embarrassed myself with a neighbor for that reason a few years ago—I met him about four times and each time asked him who he was. He took offense. But on the other hand I have a very stable memory for faces of people I know. In fact, a few years back I started to have age-related trouble with names (extremely common) and I started to fret about my memory (also very common in people of late middle age). But then I realized that when I thought of someone, the image of their face comes into my mind immediately. So it isn't my memory that's faulty, because my memory of faces of people I know is still instantaneous. It's just that the verbal name component is getting more difficult to collate with that visual memory.

Joshua Hawkins: "I've read a few posts just this morning about the new Sony 5.0 update and how it's helping sports photographers. It's huge for them. Shooting through nets, rackets and random objects between the camera and subject is just the norm for sports. This technology is really wonderful, if still young. I also really like face tracking, and especially the eye tracking, for doing editorial style work with 1.4 glass. It's really improving my hit rate on in focus shots. (I don't use Sony, but it's all the same idea between different manufacturers.)"

Tommy Williams: "I discovered that I have a well-above average ability to recognize faces when I worked at Microsoft, on the main campus, where there were more than 25,000 people present each day. I would greet people in hallways, cafeterias, and walking between buildings and many of them had no idea who I was. Rather than making people uncomfortable, I stopped greeting anyone who I suspected wouldn't recognize me."

Xf Mj: "Well okay, these made for a fun late afternoon: TestMyBrain: Super Recognizers and Face Memory Test. I always wondered...I do recall being remarkably bad at the color (shade? hue?) recognition thing you once posted."

Mike replies: Thanks for that, that was fun. I scored 61 out of 72 on the TestMyBrain one, average being 58.5 and average for my age cohort being 56.4. I'm a little surprised...I would have guessed that I was below average. It occurred to me that I might have done better if I had quickly assigned names to the six faces!

Comments

[Robert Roaldi]

Wow, wait till they make a camera that can look into your soul.

These things are usually probabilistic, be terrible if you're out there past the third standard deviation but the jury takes the camera's word over yours. Good luck trying to explain statistics to them.

[John]

The camera merely makes out a face or an eye, not the actual person’s identity. Lightroom and Apple Photos still mess up real face recognition, which is on a whole other level than what us consumers endure.

[psu]

What is the dual to prosopagnosia? That is, what do you call it if most people never remember your face, for whatever reason.

[louis mccullagh]

Canon used to have eye focus i.e. it focused where you were looking. Saved all that focus/move frame nonsense. This was in the dark ages of LOW TECH cameras that used film.

[MikeR]

Nice to have a proper word for what I've been calling "facial aphasia."

I rely on a small set of distinctive features to aid recognition, something I think of as an editorial cartoonist memory. Once, when my sister-in-law arrived at a family gathering, I didn't recognize her. She had changed her hair style to include bangs. When she pushed her hair up and off her forehead, recognition immediately snapped into place.

[Scott]

Google Photos is a super recognizer. It can instantly find anyone, including a specific pet, among tens of thousands of photos. It can also find just about any object. It automatically creates categories that you can browse through.

I gave up on categorizing and tagging photos long ago. I just tell it to show me my photos of someone or of bridges or coyotes (it has never mistaken a dog for a coyote or vice versa) or almost anything else. Amazingly impressive.

[Richard Parkin]

On “age-related trouble with names” that Mike mentions above, I think I have that but I also have an iPhone ;-) . Usually when I meet someone and cannot remember their name I do remember some other thing about them like wife’s name or part address or their organisation and so on, and since I put these sorts of things in my contact list on the phone I can usually retrieve their name. Of course I haven’t truly forgotten their name because I recognise it as being correct so it’s more a matter of retrieval from memory.

[GH]

I'm a super recognizer, and it can drive me absolutely batty, because I often don't know whether an approaching person is someone I've simply met from my son's school, or whether it's a person that I saw randomly in a crowd three years ago. I've learned the "nice to see you greeting" as a safeguard, but it's always a little awkward. I'm awful with names, so that doesn't help.

Interestingly, the portrait artist Chuck Close has prosopagnosia. I used to be a portrait photographer, and I'm not sure whether being a super recognizer was an advantage or hindrance for that kind of work.

[Rob Campbell]

I met my wife at school; years later we'd cross people in the street or wherever and she'd say look, that's so-and-so from school! I never had a clue who they were.

All my business life I suffered from the absolute inability to remember the name of someone to whom I had just been introduced. Now, not a thing has changed other than that I forget the names of people who are part-time residents here in Spain and have been neighbours for almost forty years.

As a kid I loved New Orleans jazz, and could recite the band members of several Armstrong groupings such as the Hot Five and Hot Seven as well as a list of others. Today, I may recognize a name, but wouldn't bet the ranch on knowing with whom he played most. Or even which instrument. A further complication is seeing somebody, being convinced that I recognize them, but not having the slightest idea of from where and under which circumstances. They often turn out to have been folks I see regulary in the supermarket, serving in a bar or behind the counter at the postoffice. Life is a friggin' minefield of unintended slights!

It could just be lack of use or perhaps dying cells. As for birthdays and anniversaries....

[hugh crawford]

I have a problem recognizing people sometimes so my default is to “recognize” people who act as though they expect me to recognize them, especially if they seem familiar. The only problem is when you live in NYC they means you think you think you are chatting with one of your children’s friends in the cashier line at B&H desperately trying to figure out who they are and then realize you are talking to Lady Gaga.

[Eolake]

Mike, it seems that the link to the youtube video goes to a point a couple of minutes *after* he talks about that focus, so it took me a long while to locate it (a couple minutes into the video.)

That eye focus is astonishing.

[Roger]

Perhaps off topic but here’s a video on people with perfect memory. Not the same as photographic memory. Marilou Henner from “Taxi” has it. Pretty wild.

https://youtu.be/hpTCZ-hO6iI

[I've seen that, and I loved it. I had a friend who was like that. He could remember things about me (from high school) that would only come back to me slowly, hours after he had given me all the details. Sadly he died a few years back. --Mike]

[Bear.]

I rarely forget the face but often cannot attach it to a name.

[Timothy Auger]

I'm hopeless on faces. If someone I have met two days before turns up wearing different clothes or in a different setting, I haven't a clue who they are, or even if I have seen them before. It can be very embarrassing.

And yet I can see a photo I took ten years ago, and instantly recall where the subject is and the circumstances under which I took it.

[c.d.embrey]

I'm a misanthrope (two bit word of the day). I've never remembered names (why would I?). When I meet someone whose nameless face I recognize, I just say ese (Mexican Spanish for dude). Works for me here in SoCal.

[David Graham]

Thirty years ago I worked for an independent construction contractor named Dan. Wherever we went in the city, Dan invariably ran into someone he knew, and continued the conversation he last had with them.
Once, Dan pulled the van over and called out to an older man walking along the road, saying "Aren't you ---". The man admitted to being that person, and asked Dan who he was. Dan explained he had been looking through his father's high school yearbook a few weeks before, and saw that man's picture there.
Dave

[Mark L. Power]

I have had prosopagnosia for many years. it has caused me many embarrassments over the years and given me the reputation of being aloof or worse.

Almost as irritating is that I can recognize someone I've seen in films or on TV instantly when I see them in real life even if I don't know their name which is often the case. Also, if I've seen a good photo of someone's face I can usually recognize them when I see them in the flesh. There must be a good Latin or Greek name for this opposing affliction.