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Speaking of Psychology

Encore - The people who never forget a face, with Josh Davis, PhD, and Kelly Desborough

Speaking of Psychology

Kim Mills

Health & Fitness, Life Sciences, Science, Mental Health

4.3781 Ratings

🗓️ 28 December 2022

⏱️ 34 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Super-recognizers have an extraordinary ability to recognize faces—they can pick faces they’ve seen only briefly out of a crowd and can recognize childhood acquaintances they haven’t seen in decades. Josh Davis, PhD, a professor of applied psychology at the University of Greenwich, and super-recognizer Kelly Desborough discuss the origins of this ability, why you can’t train yourself to be a super-recognizer, how super-recognizers compare with facial-recognition algorithms, and why police departments and security organizations are interested in working with super-recognizers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:28.2

Motrum Club, T&C's and Exclusion Supply. Speaking of psychology is taking a winter break,

0:36.7

so we're rerunning one of our favorite episodes

0:38.7

from the past. Last January, I talked to psychologist Josh Davis and super-recognizer Kelly Desboro

0:45.9

about what it means to be a super-recognizer, someone with an extraordinary ability to recognize faces.

0:52.9

We hope you enjoy this episode from the archives.

0:56.0

Speaking of psychology, we'll be back with new episodes in January. Thank you for listening.

1:01.5

Last year, we ran an episode about face blindness. People who are faceblindness have trouble

1:07.8

recognizing the faces of even their closest friends and family members.

1:11.6

They're at one end of a spectrum of facial recognition ability, and today we're going to talk about the people at the other end of that bell curve,

1:19.6

the super recognizers or people who never forget a face.

1:23.6

Scientists only began to study super recognizers a little over a decade ago and since then

1:29.8

they've learned a great deal about this extraordinary ability they've also begun to explore

1:35.4

together with police departments and other security organizations and businesses how

1:40.0

super recognizers might contribute to police investigations and other security work.

1:45.0

So how well can super recognizers remember faces?

1:49.0

Can they really recognize a person whom they saw for only a few minutes many years ago?

1:55.0

Are super recognizers as good as computer facial recognition algorithms?

...

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