'Super Recognizers' Like Me
vice.com
vice.com
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/the-wear-patterns-of...
Also just noticed an article on the front page talking about Portland’s ban on facial recognition technology - so this might be a well-timed advertisement for the service.
I take it as her trying to explain how her brain works around facial recognition.
I don't read it as her claiming to be 100% accurate. Not saying she isn't lying in general though.
"Are you always accurate?
Yes, I just know 100 percent. You don’t have a situation where you go, “I think that might be matey from my old job”. It’s really solid and definite."
"Do you feel nervous when you’re doing these covert operations? Not nervous, I feel invigorated, excited and absolutely determined to do the job. We don’t always find people when we’re deployed but I can say that those people have never come past us either. That’s just as good for the venues or events organizers. We cover big gigs at arenas too. The last one I did was Slipknot. We had someone deployed at every entrance of the arena. We scanned thousands of faces and they’re all irrelevant, until that one person comes past and your hairs go up on the back of your neck and you know it’s them."
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
I have a uncle with schizophrenia. He frequently opens the door before you ring the bell. He draws the conclusion that someone is there from very subtle sound cues on the other side of the wall. This all sounds very impressive until you realize how many times a day he opens the door and no one is on the other side. The ability to draw remarkable conclusions from scant evidence comes at the cost of high false positives to the point where he hears voices in background sounds. It would not surprise me if the biological mechanism of being a "super recognizer" is similar.
I'd still be surprised if the average person can't quickly recognize their mom out of context.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
So you don't have to hunt for it too.
I‘ve felt like this my entire life. The test says I might be a super recognizer, better than being forgettable I guess!