‘Super-recognizers,’ with extraordinary face recognition ability, never forget a face

Wednesday, May 20, 2009 - 13:56 in Psychology & Sociology

Some people say they never forget a face, a claim now bolstered by psychologists at Harvard University who’ve discovered a group they call “super-recognizers”: those who can easily recognize someone they met in passing, even many years later. The new study suggests that skill in facial recognition might vary widely among humans. Previous research has identified as much as 2 percent of the population as having “face-blindness,” or prosopagnosia, a condition characterized by great difficulty in recognizing faces. For the first time, this new research shows that others excel in face recognition, indicating that the trait could be on a spectrum, with prosopagnosics on the low end and super-recognizers at the high end. read more

Read the whole article on Harvard Science

More from Harvard Science

Latest Science Newsletter

Get the latest and most popular science news articles of the week in your Inbox! It's free!

Check out our next project, Biology.Net