„Super-Erkenner“ – Menschen mit außergewöhnlichen Gesichtserkennungsfähigkeiten – sehen nicht mehr Details in Gesichtern, sondern betrachten stattdessen auf natürliche Weise die Teile eines Gesichts, die die besten Informationen zur Identifizierung von Gesichtern enthalten
https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2025/11/science-behind-people-never-forget-face-recognition-super-recognisers?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social
4 Kommentare
Arvo r/science, sharing this study led by our researcher Dr James Dunn: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2025.2005
The study sought to find out what it is that super recognisers do differently when looking at a face. Researchers used eye tracking technology to measure where and for how long 37 super recognisers looked when examining photos of faces on a computer screen, and how that compared to 68 people with average facial recognition abilities.
They then recreated what people in both groups had looked at, and fed the information into nine different neural networks already trained to recognise faces. These AI networks were then given the same task as the human participants — to decide whether two faces belonged to the same person.
When the researchers compared the performance of the AI in matching faces based on super recognisers’ eye tracking patterns and that of average recognisers, they found a clear difference. Even when the total amount of information was the same, AI fed with super-recogniser data was more accurate at matching faces than AI fed with average recogniser data.
What was the requirement for being considered a super recogniser?
Wild, I didn’t realize being able to recognize faces so well is a genetic abnormality. I can recognize faces I’ve seen one time(aged or de-aged), I also cannot help but point out when people have matching features like the youtuber Johnny Harris and Zohran Mamdani as one of my more recent comparisons.
This is interesting because it implies we can train people to be super recognisers.
If you learnt what parts of the face to look at and practiced enough for it to be natural presumably you could become a super recogniser.
Of course there’s benefits for law enforcement etc but I can also see it being useful as a treatment for face blindness. Maybe we could have facial recognition therapy like we have speech therapy.