Maybe this is the super-recognizer test which lots of my recent blog readers were looking for. You don’t need to be logged on to Facebook to do it. It appears to be the creation of the UK face recognition researcher Dr Ashok Jansari and his team at the University of East London and it is presented by the UK TV show Hidden Talent. I had a go at this test and got a score in the normal, not super-recognizer range. It is a tricky test, requiring the person doing the test to identify faces seen for only seconds in two quite different emotional and visual contexts. The test is designed so that non-face elements of a person’s appearance such as hair cannot be used to identify, thus it is a true test of face recognition and can’t be cheated by using memory for other elements, and this test also it isn’t just a test of photograph recognition, which is a criticism that can be made of some other tests that only use one photo of each face in the test, with photos often including hair and other background elements. One good thing about the test is that it includes faces of both sexes, which possibly makes it a more realistic measure, while some tests of face memory used by university researchers include only male faces, including the respected Cambridge Face Memory Test. People taking this test are required to memorise faces shown from a particular angle and displaying a particular emotional expression, and are later required to identify some of these memorized faces shown in a different angle and/or a different emotional expression. This might seem like a realistic way to test face recognition but I doubt that it is, because in real-life situations even if we only meet a person for minutes or seconds we usually get the opportunity to memorize the appearance of a face across some kind of range of angles and expressions. This is not the same situation as being required to recognize a face across a range of angles and expressions. In this test I think the phase of face memorization is limited compared to real-life situations of face memorization. If the difference between a natural super-recognizer and a normal recognizer lies in the richness of the encoding of the memories of faces, then this test might not be fit to measure this. I believe the fairly artificial limtation of the memorization phase is one of this test’s flaws, and in this respect it reminds me a lot of the second test of face recognition which I was given to do when I volunteered as a research subject in an Australian university in 2011. I don’t know the official name of that test and I was never informed of my score in that test. In that test I was required to memorize Chinese-looking male faces in profile and identify them displayed in a full-face angle, and it just didn’t feel like face recognition. I know that any success that I had in that test was probably due to employing conscious strategies for face matching (such as making conscious note of facial features and matching skin colours), which most certainly isn’t natural face recognition (which is a completely automatic and unconscious process, rather like synaesthesia).
One could also definitely criticise this test for not being large or long enough, and thus more likely to give results biased by chance. There are only 11 faces presented for memorization, to be picked out of a set of 15 faces presented in the second part of the test. Compare this with the short version of the Cambridge Face Memory Test with a maximum possible score of 72, and it’s clear that this test is not a lot more than a bit of fun. One definite problem with this test is that I found that I could get a score in the normal range using a very simple strategy without even looking at the faces. I’m wondering how anyone could get a score in the low range, and this test appears to have no value for identifying prosopagnosia. A criticism that could be levelled at all tests of face recognition or face memory is that they don’t reflect real life face recognition situations. When we meet people, even if it is just for a few seconds, we usually see a moving, speaking image, not a still image, and in that movement we see not just a face from a range of angles but also the accompanying body language, probably a range of different emotional expressions, and also the very individual ways in which a person moves their face and body. When you meet a person you see the life and the personality in their face and body, not just a static piece of meat, and that is more memorable than a still image of a face. I’m wondering why face recognition researchers haven’t come up with a test that uses video clips rather than still photographs. It seems like an obvious way to make a face recognition test more like a test of what people need to be able to do in real life.
Super recogniser. https://apps.facebook.com/hiddentalentshow/fb/tests/recognizer
I wouldn’t know about this piece of pop music if we didn’t have any teenager in our family. I don’t know a thing about this band, except that they are probably young and talented. When I heard the sound of this tune floating out of one of the bedrooms of our house I wondered if it might be Tame Impala. This tune struck me as a bit psychedelic because of the colour in the chorus, with its wooo wooo wooo style of singing, which is the kind of thing that you might find in the chorus of a psychedelic song. The colour is a pleasant light mauve-grey, rather like the colour that is currently in the background of this blog.
http://youtu.be/WkKJHYHCt6Q
I’ve come across a YouTube video in which Dr Marlene Behrmann talks in an interview from last year about prosopagnosia and gives an authoritative explanation of what it is. She seems to have a slight South African accent.
While watching Dr Behrmann discussing the differences between the typical eye movements of prosopagnosics and regular study subjects while looking at faces I wondered whether the typical eye movements of super-recognizer study subjects might be found to be similar or disssimilar to the eye movements of normal people with average face recognition ability.
Peng, Cynthia Marlene Behrmann – prosopagnosia. goCognitive. uploaded Sep 25, 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-z9PGrgPlYw&feature=related
May 24, 2012 – 4:53 pm
Categories: Uncategorized
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Tagged Carnegie Mellon University, Coping Strategies in Disability, Cynthia Peng, Eye Movement Tracking, Face Recognition, Face-blindness, Fusiform gyrus, Marlene Behrmann, Motor Vehicle Recognition, Object Recognition, Occipital Lobe, Prosopagnosia, Super-recognizers, Temporal lobe, Voice Recognition, Within-Class Discrimination, YouTube
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Wednesdays are usually good days for reader stats but yesterday there was an extraordinary spike in stats for this blog. It was a large amount of traffic from the UK, and appears to be a media-driven upswing in interest in testing relevant to super-recognizers or superrecognition. There is definitely an international interest in an online test specifically designed to sort super-recognisers from normal people which is culturally-neutral and substantial enough to give meaningful results. It’s a pity such a thing does not appear to be freely available.
As I pushed my trolley around the end of the aisle at Woolies there she was. Jean. I recalled the day of the week to see if this encounter confirmed my theory. Yes, it was a Wednesday afternoon, just like the last time. Same shopping centre, same day of the week, same time of the day, again spotted shopping alone in a supermarket. When you think about it, having a regular routine of doing the weekly grocery shop on a Wednesday afternoon is the most sensible and efficient plan possible, all things being equal. Many retailers get a replenishment of stock on a Wednesday, no doubt in preparation for the retail rushes during Thursday and Friday night trading, and the Saturday frenzy, which is a scene to be avoided at all costs. I know whenever I ask a shop assistant about some product which I need which is out of stock, I always get told “We’re expecting more on Wednesday, can you come back on Wednesday?”. If you do your weekly shop on a Wednesday afternoon, that fits in after a working day, shopping time doesn’t eat into the weekend, and it gives the retailers time to shelve any new stock that came in Wednesday morning. If I were a more perfect and rational being leading a life that is controlled and ordered I’d be following this type of routine, but to tell you the truth, I’m not completely sold on the idea of rational perfection. What type of person is Jean?
“Blackboy” looks like a “black man” at park in Perth suburb – an example of pareidolia
Orange glass vase in window display looks like a face from one angle – example of pareidolia
Shipwreck by Steve Croquett at Sculpture by the Sea Cottesloe 2012
Most taste experiences are an amalgam of taste sensation on the tongue and smell sensations in the nose, so to be completely correct this isn’t purely triggered by a taste, smell is certainly an element, but in plain-language terms, the trigger is a novel taste or flavour.
This only happens during the unusual situation in which I am at a public swimming pool or some other place where I have the smell of chlorine in my nose and I am also drinking iced coffee, and there is some kind of chemical reaction between the chlorine and the coffee in my mouth/nose resulting in a peculiar smell/taste that is somewhat like a floral or perfumey smell. It is a black-coloured smell/taste. Sometimes the image of a black-coloured flower flashes into my mind, shaped something like a simple lily. Upon reflection I believe that it is the surprise or novelty of the modification of the usual flavour of iced coffee that is the synaesthesia trigger or inducer. Often as an afterthought after this experience I realise that the normal taste of iced coffee is a brown-coloured taste, but I never notice this as it is such an ordinary thing that it kind of stays below the level of consciousness.
Inspired by reading the fascinating fairly new journal paper by Spanish researchers comparing some more rare types of synesthesia with auras in mysticism, I have been playing with the idea of writing a post in which I list all of the types of synaesthesia that I have ever experienced, the common and the rare, and then I started writing down all of the rare types that I’ve only ever had happen a few times or even only once. I noticed something interesting about these types – out of a total of eight that I’ve thought of, three of them appear to be triggered by the novelty of a sensory or linguistic experience, and all other five types have some aspect of a person or persons as the “inducer” or trigger. So my rarely experienced types of synaesthesia appear to have completely different categories of triggers as my more frequent or ordinary synaesthesia experiences, which can be triggered by learned concepts such as years or numbers, or can be triggered by movement (manual chores) or music or purely sensory experiences like smell or voices. There seem to be two really quite distinct classes of synaesthesia types, the rare sporadic types triggered by persons or novelty, and the common frequent types triggered by the types of sensory and conceptual stimuli that researchers have already fully explored and described, at least in the way that my mind works. Why?
May 16, 2012 – 10:06 pm
Categories: Uncategorized
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Tagged Facial Expressions, Novelty, Personal Attributes as Synaesthesia Inducers, Personality->colour synaesthesia, Rarely-experienced Synaesthesia Types, Synaesthesia, Synaesthesia and Food, Synaesthesia involving face perception, Synesthesia, The Strange Phenomenon
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I’ve noticed a few interesting things about the way that visual memory of scenes or landscapes is naturally and involuntarily connected with other types of thinking in some interesting ways in my mind, which seem to be like or related to synaesthesia. Perhaps the oddest and least “normal” of these is a type of synaesthesia that I experience in which hand movements while doing various specific chores trigger permanently but idiosyncratically linked visual memories of scenes. An example would be involuntarily seeing in my mind’s eye for a second or two a scene of the front of the family doctor’s suburban surgery which my family visited in the 1970s, with its glossy pea-green painted decorative woodwork and moist garden, when I would carefully slide in a decorative comb to keep my hair in place. I’ve also noticed that some people, including some of my other synaesthete relatives and myself, experience a visual/memory phenomenon that appears to be a naturally and spontaneously occurring version of the memory technique that is known as the method of loci. We have noticed that when we revisit and view a specific outdoor place where we learned new information in the past, we might find that the exact thought that we had been learning at that exact spot in the past is re-activated our minds automatically. The information previously learned is generally of a conceptual nature, the result of listening to talk radio or reading a book, but sometimes memories of specific pop songs heard in the past are evoked. An example would be remembering the concept of people being killed in the Black Saturday bushfires evoked by watching the scenery while being driven past the exact spot on Flinders Street in Yokine where one sat in a stationary vehicle stopped at traffic lights as one listened in 2009 to morning news on the car radio giving the first full confirmation of the seriousness of the disaster.
Another synaesthesia-like linking of visual memories with another type of thought would be the involuntary illustration of thinking about some specific concepts with scenes of visual memories that are sometimes semantically related, sometimes temporally or randomly linked, and often very dated. I might see a scene of trees on the Rockingham foreshore from decades ago when thinking about the concept of the most popular hits of the latter part of the career of the Beatles. Maybe the “rock” in Rockingham or the British migrants living there are the reason for the linking of these things. As an illustration for thinking of the concept of a nightclub I might see in my mind’s eye the dark and sparse interior of a bar (or was it a nightclub?) which I think was on the ground floor level among St George’s Terrace skyscrapers in the 1970s. Was it called “The Foxy Lady”? No joke, I think it was. It was the 1970s. It was the era of no taste and even less subtlety. Yes, I think there indeed was once a bar on the terrace called The Foxy Lady. How do I know what the inside of it looked like?
