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      Face Recognition by Metropolitan Police Super-Recognisers

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          Abstract

          Face recognition is used to prove identity across a wide variety of settings. Despite this, research consistently shows that people are typically rather poor at matching faces to photos. Some professional groups, such as police and passport officers, have been shown to perform just as poorly as the general public on standard tests of face recognition. However, face recognition skills are subject to wide individual variation, with some people showing exceptional ability—a group that has come to be known as ‘super-recognisers’. The Metropolitan Police Force (London) recruits ‘super-recognisers’ from within its ranks, for deployment on various identification tasks. Here we test four working super-recognisers from within this police force, and ask whether they are really able to perform at levels above control groups. We consistently find that the police ‘super-recognisers’ perform at well above normal levels on tests of unfamiliar and familiar face matching, with degraded as well as high quality images. Recruiting employees with high levels of skill in these areas, and allocating them to relevant tasks, is an efficient way to overcome some of the known difficulties associated with unfamiliar face recognition.

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          Most cited references26

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          The Glasgow Face Matching Test.

          We describe a new test for unfamiliar face matching, the Glasgow Face Matching Test (GFMT). Viewers are shown pairs of faces, photographed in full-face view but with different cameras, and are asked to make same/different judgments. The full version of the test comprises 168 face pairs, and we also describe a shortened version with 40 pairs. We provide normative data for these tests derived from large subject samples. We also describe associations between the GFMT and other tests of matching and memory. The new test correlates moderately with face memory but more strongly with object matching, a result that is consistent with previous research highlighting a link between object and face matching, specific to unfamiliar faces. The test is available free for scientific use.
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            Matching identities of familiar and unfamiliar faces caught on CCTV images.

            People can be inaccurate at matching unfamiliar faces shown in high-quality video images, even when viewpoint and facial expressions are closely matched. However, identification of highly familiar faces appears good, even when video quality is poor. Experiment 1 reported a direct comparison between familiar and unfamiliar faces. Participants who were personally familiar with target items appearing on video were highly accurate at a verification task. Unfamiliar participants doing the same task performed very inaccurately. Familiarity affected discriminability, but not bias. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that brief periods of familiarization have little beneficial effect unless "deep" or "social" processing is encouraged. The results show that video evidence can be used effectively as a probe to identity when the faces shown are highly familiar to observers, but caution should be used where images of unfamiliar people are being compared.
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              Super-recognizers: people with extraordinary face recognition ability.

              We tested 4 people who claimed to have significantly better than ordinary face recognition ability. Exceptional ability was confirmed in each case. On two very different tests of face recognition, all 4 experimental subjects performed beyond the range of control subject performance. They also scored significantly better than average on a perceptual discrimination test with faces. This effect was larger with upright than with inverted faces, and the 4 subjects showed a larger "inversion effect" than did control subjects, who in turn showed a larger inversion effect than did developmental prosopagnosics. This result indicates an association between face recognition ability and the magnitude of the inversion effect. Overall, these "super-recognizers" are about as good at face recognition and perception as developmental prosopagnosics are bad. Our findings demonstrate the existence of people with exceptionally good face recognition ability and show that the range of face recognition and face perception ability is wider than has been previously acknowledged.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                PLoS ONE
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, CA USA )
                1932-6203
                26 February 2016
                2016
                : 11
                : 2
                : e0150036
                Affiliations
                [001]Department of Psychology, University of York, York, United Kingdom
                University of Lincoln, UNITED KINGDOM
                Author notes

                Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

                Conceived and designed the experiments: DJR EN AJD RJ AMB. Performed the experiments: DJR. Analyzed the data: DJR EN AJD RJ AMB. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: DJR EN AJD. Wrote the paper: DJR EN AJD RJ AMB.

                Article
                PONE-D-15-49130
                10.1371/journal.pone.0150036
                4769018
                26918457
                4c87683e-3749-44af-83be-6f254a81fffe
                © 2016 Robertson et al

                This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 10 November 2015
                : 8 February 2016
                Page count
                Figures: 3, Tables: 0, Pages: 8
                Funding
                The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / ERC Grant Agreement n.323262, and from the Economic and Social Research Council, UK (ES/J022950/1). http://erc.europa.eu/; http://www.esrc.ac.uk/. The funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
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