Some People Never Forget a Face, and Now We Know Their Secret (sciencealert.com)
(Monday November 17, 2025 @10:30PM (BeauHD)
from the would-you-look-at-that dept.)
- Reference: 0180112065
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/11/17/2229216/some-people-never-forget-a-face-and-now-we-know-their-secret
- Source link: https://www.sciencealert.com/some-people-never-forget-a-face-and-now-we-know-their-secret
[1]alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert:
> A new study from researchers in Australia reveals that the people who never forget faces look "smarter, not harder." In other words, they naturally [2]focus on a person's most distinguishing facial features . "Their skill isn't something you can learn like a trick," explains lead author James Dunn, a psychology researcher at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney. "It's an automatic, dynamic way of picking up what makes each face unique."
>
> To see what super-recognizers see, Dunn and his colleagues used eye-tracking technology to reconstruct how people surveyed new faces. They did this with 37 super-recognizers and 68 people with ordinary facial recognition skills, noting where and for how long participants looked at pictures of faces displayed on a computer screen. The researchers then fed the data into machine learning algorithms trained to recognize faces. The algorithms, a type known as deep neural networks, were tasked with deciding if two faces belonged to the same person.
"These findings suggest that the perceptual foundations of individual differences in face recognition ability may originate at the earliest stages of visual processing -- at the level of retinal encoding," Dunn and colleagues [3]write in their paper.
The findings have been [4]published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences .
[1] https://slashdot.org/~alternative_right
[2] https://www.sciencealert.com/some-people-never-forget-a-face-and-now-we-know-their-secret
[3] https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2025/11/science-behind-people-never-forget-face-recognition-super-recognisers
[4] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2025.2005
> A new study from researchers in Australia reveals that the people who never forget faces look "smarter, not harder." In other words, they naturally [2]focus on a person's most distinguishing facial features . "Their skill isn't something you can learn like a trick," explains lead author James Dunn, a psychology researcher at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney. "It's an automatic, dynamic way of picking up what makes each face unique."
>
> To see what super-recognizers see, Dunn and his colleagues used eye-tracking technology to reconstruct how people surveyed new faces. They did this with 37 super-recognizers and 68 people with ordinary facial recognition skills, noting where and for how long participants looked at pictures of faces displayed on a computer screen. The researchers then fed the data into machine learning algorithms trained to recognize faces. The algorithms, a type known as deep neural networks, were tasked with deciding if two faces belonged to the same person.
"These findings suggest that the perceptual foundations of individual differences in face recognition ability may originate at the earliest stages of visual processing -- at the level of retinal encoding," Dunn and colleagues [3]write in their paper.
The findings have been [4]published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences .
[1] https://slashdot.org/~alternative_right
[2] https://www.sciencealert.com/some-people-never-forget-a-face-and-now-we-know-their-secret
[3] https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2025/11/science-behind-people-never-forget-face-recognition-super-recognisers
[4] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2025.2005
"And now we know there sikrit"? (Score:2)
by Mr. Dollar Ton ( 5495648 )
> the perceptual foundations of individual differences in face recognition ability may originate at the earliest stages of visual processing
Sounds like we "know" jackshit - just some supposition based on what a "model"-generated slop appeared to show to a bunch of slowpokes.
names (Score:2)
by bugs2squash ( 1132591 )
but do they remember their names - is that part of their retinal encoding too ?
Re: (Score:2)
by careysub ( 976506 )
You could ride a long for while claiming to recognize people but have poor name recall by saying "Hey! It's you!" to everybody, but then they could slip in someone you could not have ever met.
TLDR (Score:1)
They are cyborgs. There, saved you a click.