THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYrecent research in Austria and the UK indicates that face-recognition
difficulties are not that uncommon. Thomas and Martina Grueter at
the University of Vienna and the Institute of Genetics surveyed 689
students and found that seventeen had serious face-recognition prob-
lems. Around the same time, Bradley Duchaine and his colleagues at
University College London conducted a vast Internet survey of over
1500 participants and similarly found that about two percent had some
degree of face blindness.
The people identified by these researchers appear either to have been
born with their face-recognition difficulties or to have developed them
early in life. There’s evidence too that prosopagnosia can run in families.
When Thomas and Martina Grueter carried out follow-up investigations
on some of the seventeen students with face-recognition difficulties,
they found that they all had family members with similar problems. So
it’s likely that “developmental prosopagnosia”, as it’s known, has been
around for a long time. The fact that it remained undiscovered for so
long was probably due to the embarrassment of those with the problem,
combined with their ability to create alternative recognition strategies,
such as focusing on people’s clothes and voices.
Even more recently, psychologists have speculated that there may
also be a minority of people who have a rare form of exceptional face-
recognition ability – so-called super-recognizers. It seems that the
research on developmental face-blindness was so widely reported in
the media that this prompted several people to come forward claiming
exceptional face-recognition powers. In a 2009 study, Richard Russell
at Harvard University and his colleagues tested four such people and
found that they outperformed 25 age-matched controls on a series of
challenging tests. These included identifying the faces of celebrities
before they were famous, and identifying previously presented faces
from odd angles, or under poor viewing conditions. On these and other
tests, the super-recognizers were superior to controls by an impressive
amount, roughly equivalent to the degree by which developmental
prosopagnosics are inferior to normal controls. Russell’s team said that
their discovery of super-recognizers had important implications for
the real world – just think how useful it could be to have one of these
people on your security team or in the witness stand.