LAUSR

Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications has now released the first batch of articles on this special topic. In addition to this editorial, we (Lander, Bruce & Bindemann, 2018) have published here a narrative review of the topic. In our review we note that, with the exception of work on impairments in face recognition (prosopagnosia), research has only recently begun to investigate why there are such wide variations in individual abilities to perceive and recognise faces. These investigations have raised as many questions as answers about the reasons why some people are so much better than others at recognising faces. Our review also highlighted two specific areas of application the recruitment and use of “super-recogniser” (SRs) in forensic operations, and the scrutiny of passport or other identity photographs used to gain access to restricted areas. These are areas that a number of the papers published here address. McCaffery, Robertson, Young & Burton (2018) measure performance on a test of face comparison, the Glasgow Face Matching Test (hereafter GFMT), a test of face memory, the Cambridge Face Memory Test (hereafter CFMT) and a test of recognising familiar faces “Before They Were Famous” (BTWF). They investigate correlation between performance on the different tests and correlation between the tests and self-assessment of face-recognition ability (in a first study) and other perceptual matching and recognition tasks (in a second study). In general, there was correlation between the face tasks, consistent with the idea that there is a general face-perception factor, which appears to account for about 25% of performance variance (cf. Verhallen et al., 2017). Task-specific influences were also found e.g., people’s self-ratings of face-recognition ability correlated only with BTWF and non-face tasks that required matching correlated only with GFMT. Thus, McCaffery et al. reinforce evidence that some people are better than others at a range of face perception and recognition tasks and that such facility cannot be attributed entirely to more general perceptual or memory abilities. While such differences appear to support the identification and recruitment of SRs, the paper by Sarah Bate and colleagues (2018) suggests that more complex, task-specific screening tools may be needed. They recruited 200 people who thought they were potential SRs and tested them on the long form of the CFMT and three new and demanding tests of face matching, face memory and searching crowds for faces resembling a composite image. While a (bare) majority of the 200 showed some degree of consistently good performance across two or more tests, fewer than 50% of them (89 in total) performed well enough on the CFMT alone to support their self-assessment as SRs. And of these, just 37 were also superior at both the other tests of face memory and matching. Performance on the new test of matching to crowds was not predicted by any of the other tests. Megan Papesh (2018) adds to previous research (e.g., White, Kemp, Jenkins, Matheson, & Burton, 2014) by showing that professionals, whose jobs require frequent image-matching, are no better than inexperienced student control participants at matching identities between face images. She recruited over 800 professional notaries and 70 bank tellers and found that they were no better than undergraduate controls at a face-matching task. Moreover, individual differences in the frequency of face matching in these occupational settings, and years of work experience, did not impact on the professionals’ performance. However, performance was negatively correlated with age, with older participants performing more poorly. Where scrutinising facial identities is an important component of a job, there may also be scope to recruit people likely to perform more accurately. Balsdon, Summersby, Kemp & White (2018) evaluated the efficacy of using screening tests to select for the job of scrutinising submitted passport photographs for validity. There was correlation between performance on the three screening tests used (CFMT, GFMT and a self-report questionnaire), but * Correspondence: [email protected] Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK Full list of author information is available at the end of the article Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications