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

4.3 • 781 Ratings

🗓️ 19 January 2022

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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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. Dr. Josh Davis, 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 security organizations are interested in working with super-recognizers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:27.7	Last year, we ran an episode about face blindness.
0:31.8	People who are faceblind have trouble recognizing the faces of even their closest friends and family members.
0:38.3	They're at one end of a spectrum of facial recognition ability,
0:41.3	and today we're going to talk about the people at the other end of that bell curve,
0:46.3	the super recognizers, or people who never forget a face.
0:50.3	Scientists only began to study super recognizers a little over a decade ago,
0:55.0	and since then, they've learned a great deal about this extraordinary ability.
1:00.0	They've also begun to explore, together with police departments and other security organizations and businesses,
1:06.0	how super recognizers might contribute to police investigations and other security work.
1:11.6	So how well can super recognizers remember faces?
1:14.6	Can they really recognize a person whom they saw for only a few minutes many years ago?
1:20.6	Are super recognizers as good as computer facial recognition algorithms?
1:25.6	And can you train yourself to be a super
1:29.0	recognizer or at least improve your own facial recognition ability? Or is this something
1:34.1	you have to be born with? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the
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