Is face recognition (in conjunction with other forms of identification) once again the key to solving a crime mystery?

“I started to read about the shearers’ strike and I made a discovery. I found a photograph of the Strike Committee and there, standing up, in the middle is a person that I know was Joe Quinn. At this stage, he was calling himself Payne but I know him and recognise him as Joe Quinn from Gatton. I was so surprised to see that he was quite an influential member of the strike committee. And I remembered evidence that had been disregarded that Michael had a confrontation with a union official in a barber shop in north west Queensland and I wondered if the confrontation had been with this man, Joe Quinn.” - STEPHANIE BENNETT

This is a transcript from a story on the current affairs TV series Australian Story about a lady by the name of Stephanie Bennett who has spent years trying to solve the mystery of the horrific and vile Gatton murders. Bennett’s theory is that Quinn was the ringleader in the murders in company with others. I find her argument believable. Here are some more quotes from the transcript of the report:

“So Mum believes that Joe Quinn had been using aliases for years to evade the law. But he had a tattoo, he had some missing fingers, and he’d had a gunshot accident to the groin some years ago.” - ANGELA O’MALIA

“And under the name Adams, he is described as having one tattoo on his left forearm…” - STEPHANIE BENNETT

My knowledge of critical thinking and fallacies in decision-making tells me that questions need to be asked about this kind of evidence. Was the tattoo an exact match, visually or by description? How common was it for men at the time to have a tattoo on the left forearm, missing fingers or a gunshot wound to the groin? One needs to always consider base rates within the relevant population before deciding that some characteristic is unusual or abnormal or significant in some way. One must also ask how reliable was Bennett’s visual recognition of Quinn in the photo. But I guess such doubts might be unnecessary given the info that Quinn lost his job and was sent to jail for past crimes. One can only assume that this conviction was based on good evidence available at the time.

This interesting mystery is one of countless demonstrations of the importance of excellent face memory ability in solving crimes and identifying suspects, and it also demonstrates why we should never discourage the habit of criminal types to adorn their bodies with tattoos. In doing this they give a gift to police and detectives who are trying to identify persons of interest. Faces and tattoos are highly visible, permanent and distinctive features that can be used to identify people who are suspected of committing crimes. It is a wonder and a paradox that the section of society which has the most to lose from having a tattoo is the one that appears to have the most enthusiasm for getting them.

The story of this Australian murder mystery is also a reminder that criminals and psychopaths can and often do have charismatic and popular personalities. Regardless of whether or not Quinn was involved in the murders, it appears that he had been a leader in one of Australia’s most important industrial disputes, but also had a criminal past and a habit of using false names, and his dark past eventually caught up with him resulting in some time in prison. There is a popular image of the criminal psychopaths as loners, but it is more often the case that they are leaders.

Australian Story. When Blood Runs Cold – Transcript: Monday, 17 June , 2013. http://www.abc.net.au/austory/content/2012/s3783411.htm

You know you’re a super-recognizer when….

……you identify an Australian character actor in a terrific old English horror movie that was made in 1945, filmed when the actress was young and had no Australian accent, and many years before she was most famous in Australia.

Dead of Night – IMDb – cast – http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037635/fullcredits?ref_=tt_ov_st_sm#cast

If you have a taste for evil ventriloquists’ dummies, this is one to watch for sure.

Scenes, scenes, scenes, my idle thoughts are filled with scenes

While trying to get my finger into the groove on the inner side of sticks of celery to wash them properly scenes of Leederville around the area of the Luna Cinema and the Leederville TAFE or tech or whatever they call it these days flashes into my mind automatically. There is no logical or temporal connection between celery and Leederville that I know of. This is just another example of my fine motor task – visual place memory synaesthesia. I named it myself. As far as I know I’m the first person to ever describe this type of synaesthesia in detail. I experience it all the time, and it is such an ordinary part of my life that I barely notice it. I’ve also described other types of synaesthesia that are either triggered by seeing scenes or which have visual memories of scenes as the surprising thing that is triggered by doing things such as household manual chores or thinking about particular concepts or reading or listening to a narrative story or non-fiction account that has scenes in it.

The stuff of thought is scenes and visualizations. In my opinion the front of the brain is over-rated for importance in thought compared to the back end and the under-side of the brain, which does visual processing. I believe we need to take a new LOOK at the way the brain works.

One way to hide your face – stack on weight

The Australian politician Joe Hockey has lost a lot of weight in the last year, and now we are able to see the full character and structure in his face. I think he does look a bit older without the chubbiness, but at the same time I think his appearance is now more like a person to be taken seriously. In my opinion the full emergence of Hockey’s facial features from behind a layer of padding highlights an issue that facial recognition technology researchers need to consider – the issue of excess weight or obesity altering facial appearance and making face recognition more difficult (because it makes faces more generic) or more likely to give a false negative (when done across a range of weight gain or weight loss in the same person). These days obesity and also the dramatic loss of large amounts of weight from gastric surgery are more common than ever, so these factors have an increasing impact on face recognition. The visual effect of weight loss on a face is a bit like looking at a coastline at low tide. It might be the same land but it isn’t the same scene.

Another sculpture of personified fast food

Cool for Kids by Judith Forrest, located at Agora Village Square Park, Trinity. Alkimos, Western Australia

Playground at Agora Village Square Park, Trinity at Alkimos.

Burger monster sculpture on drive-thru bollard at a McDonalds restaurant

Scene at sunset from picnic seating at the playground at Agora Village Square Park, Trinity at Alkimos.

I don’t know what inspires a sculptor to create a work depicting a piece of fast food with human characteristics, but I think it does demonstrate how much the personification of things that aren’t persons is a ubiquitous part of human psychology, not only for those of us who naturally personify numbers and letters with one variation of synaesthesia. Judith Forrest might be horrified if I compare her work with those cute hamburgers with faces that decorate the tops of poles in the drive-thrus of McDonalds restaurants, but I will anyway. Another odd fact which I can’t explain is that this new playground isn’t the only one in the Perth metro area which features one or more sculptures of personified objects. The Piney Lakes Sensory Playground south of the river includes many striking and whimsical sculptures including some personified letters of the alphabet, which for me, a multi-synaesthete with ordinal-linguistic personification, have a special appeal. I think those sculptures might be the work of Anne Fine, and I’ve written about them in the past.

The inclusion of sculptures in a new playground is some indication of the level of quality of this new property development. I’ve spent many a happy hour supervising kids in WA playgrounds, but I think this small playground is the best example I’ve seen of bringing the beauty of the natural local landscape, flora and fauna into a park and playground area. This is an attractive, intelligently-made playspace with play equipment that kids genuinely enjoy, and recreational areas for families that are a pleasure to use. The only issue is a lack of toilets, but I guess that is because this park was created for local residents. If you sit still, tiny blue wrens can be seen darting about in the bushes of WA coastal native plants around the playground at sunset. I wish the Opportunity Playspace on Scenic Drive in Wanneroo (Rotary Park) was a bit more like this wonderful playground. I don’t know exactly who created the Agora Village Square Park, but I’d like to say you’ve done a top job.

Sculpture by the Sea, Cottesloe Beach, memories and the method of loci go together so naturally

Even though I no longer live near Cottesloe, I make a point of visiting Sculpture by the Sea every year, with at least one of our kids in tow. We love it, and we love swimming at Cott Main Beach (not too deep though, we aren’t that daring). In the last few years I’ve visited with the child of ours who has as strong an interest in the sculptures as I do, so I’ve been able to take my time to really appreciate the pieces, and in doing this to memorize the sculptures seen, in context in their locations. This means that as I tour through the various highly memorable locations along the foreshore of one of Perth’s oldest beaches, I get to visually experience things that are there, and also things that once were there at that exact location. The organizers of the exhibition unavoidably re-use many specific locations for situating sculptures from year to year, so when I look at a sculpture I also often see in my mind’s eye a sculpture that was at that spot last year, or maybe in a year before that. This is an example of the unconscious or unintentional employment of the method of loci memory technique. I have written other posts at his blog about similar experiences of mine and our children in which we have memorized stuff with this or a similar method by accident, and I have even given a name to this phenomenon; involuntary method of loci memorization or IMLM for short.

Standing and looking at many locations along the Cottesloe Main Beach foreshore also evokes memories of family and personal visits to the beach in past years, in addition to the over-laying of more recent memories of the annual sculpture exhibition which has been operating in Cottesloe since 2005. Memories evoked include the time we ate fish and chips there when we were still unmarried, the day I unexpectedly met an elderly aunt (she’s long-dead now), then paddling with her and being shocked by finding a scallop that was unexpectedly alive, memories of many visits with my mother, a sibling and a grandmother which are sometimes also evoked by listening to a specific piece of music from the 1980s, and memories of swimming with my sibling at night in the cold fresh-water pool that was once situated near the groyne, the water tasting strangely sweet following the taste of salt water from swimming in the sea. I could point out the specific locations where I saw the dead whale and also where I touched the rough skin of a large dead shark that someone had displayed like a trophy at the shoreline, both events witnessed when I was a child. There probably isn’t a public place in Perth that evokes as many memories for me as Cottesloe Beach. If there is a neuron or a location within my synaesthete brain “for” Cottesloe Beach, it is surely thickly surrounded by many connections.

The 10th annual Sculpture by the Sea exhibition at Cottesloe will be open from March 7th to March 24th 2014. I can’t wait.  http://www.sculpturebythesea.com/exhibitions/cottesloe.aspx

Pareidolia in a squashed plastic choc-milk bottle

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=619558368056300&set=a.352718398073633.93806.131153923563416&type=1&theater

Can electroconvulsive therapy (ECT, electroshock) cause permanent acquired prosopagnosia?

It seems very clear that ECT can cause at least temporary acquired prosopagnosia or severely impaired face memory:

“In this building I, I saw her maybe four times, I visited maybe four times, and um, she progressively got less aware of who I was. On one occasion she didn’t know me from Adam.”

That is a quote from an episode (titled “Mind Control”) in the television series Into the Mind, featuring Dr Michael Mosley (I very much like his TV work and the shows he appears in). The person the quote refers to had been an attractive English 21 year-old lady named Mary Thornton who was sent to a psychiatric institution by her parents after some family conflicts. Patients in that institution were given extreme and experimental treatments: deep sleep therapy, heavy regimes of psychiatric drugs and ECT. The doctor who dreamed-up these experimental regimes of psychiatric treatment was the ambitious and controversial psychiatrist Dr William Sargant, who apparently set out explicitly to destroy memory in his treatment and also reportedly had his own history of psychiatric illness (depression).

The person who spoke the above quote in the TV series was the then-boyfriend of the young lady who had been given the extreme psychiatric treatment. For a while after being released from St Thomas’ Hospital in London she forgot that she had ever had a boyfriend, but then the memory returned and she found his phone number. They met again, and have been together ever since. As you might expect, many of the other patients did not have such happiness in their lives following release from psychiatric care. Some never made it out of that hospital alive. Australian history has a similar horror story of very similar forms of psychiatric abuse, in the Chelmsford Hospital scandal, which led to a Royal Commission into Deep Sleep Therapy. Twenty-four Australian patients had died as the result of deep sleep therapy. The Australian version of Dr Sargant was Dr Harry Bailey, Chief Psychiatrist at Chelmsford Private Hospital. It is thought he was responsible for the deaths of 85 patients. Bailey killed himself before he could be held accountable for his crimes.

A quote from Mary Thornton:

“My memories are like snap-shots, one is the electrodes being touched to the side of my head, being given a general anaesthetic, seeing an image of myself in a mirror one day, seeing a strange face looking back at myself, and being really, really frightened that I would never get out.”

We must make sure that such medical abuse is never, ever allowed to happen again, in any corner of the globe.

Links to relevant info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroconvulsive_therapy#Effects_on_memory

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=William_Sargant&oldid=546499660

http://www.bbcactivevideoforlearning.com/1/TitleDetails.aspx?TitleID=23342

Where are tests for people who suspect they or their kids have prosopagnosia?

The top search term leading to this blog for the last month has been “prosopagnosia test”, even though this blog is primarily about the opposite condition of super-recognition, and also covers another brain-based peculiarity of mine which is synaesthesia. I also write about prosopagnosia and link to relevant resources because I understand the importance of face memory as a human ability which we are all assumed to possess, but which many people do not possess. I’m sure the recent upswing in interest in testing for prosopagnosia or face-blindness or facial agnosia or a disability in face memory is due to the famous actor Brad Pitt’s recently publicized interview in Esquire magazine in which he revealed that he suspects that he has prosopagnosia, and his poor face memory has had a definite negative impact on his social life. He has been lucky in that an American expert in face memory and prosopagnosia has publicly offered testing and brain imaging to Mr Pitt. This is great, but whether he takes up this offer is his decision. What about less famous people who have similar suspicions about their own face memory ability or that of a person in their life? What about parents who suspect that their child or children might have prosopagnosia? We know that one type of prosopagnosia is developmental prosopagnosia, which affects people from early in life and can run in families and is certainly genetically inherited. Don’t assume that it is a disability that kids will grow out of; as far as I know this is not true. We have good reasons for believing that children who can’t recognize faces and therefore probably have social difficulties and possibly anxiety issues as a result would be especially at risk of being wrongly diagnosed and stigmatized as being on the autistic spectrum. It is very important that people of all ages who might have prosopagnosia be identified, informed and if possible helped. We are in the midst of an upswing in interest in this issue. So where is the help? Where are the tests? Where should Australians or British people wanting to know about prosopagnosia testing go to for help?

After searching thru many dead links I’ve found a link that appears to lead to an online version of the Cambridge Face Memory Test. This is probably the best face memory test available today. There are two versions; the short and the long form. The short version has 72 questions in it. It can be important to know which you did, but I suspect that the test linked to here will give a score in the proper context. http://www.icn.ucl.ac.uk/facetests/fgcfmt/fgCFMT.php

For the testing of children, one of the leading face memory researchers who created the CFMT, Dr Brad Duchaine, and two other researchers, Kirsten Dalrymple and Jesse Gomez, have created the CFMT-Kids, which “…is available to other researchers”, so I’ll guess parents will have to find a face memory researcher in their city (good luck) and do some begging.  I don’t know if this test is available online, but I suspect that it isn’t.  http://w.journalofvision.org/content/12/9/492.short

For help and advice I guess Faceblind.org would be the best place to look on the internet:  http://www.faceblind.org/

References

Kirsten Dalrymple, Jesse Gomez and Brad Duchaine CFMT-Kids: A new test of face memory for children. Journal of Vision. August 13th 2012 vol. 12 no. 9 article 492. doi: 10.1167/12.9.492.

http://sciencealerts.com/stories/1967742/CFMTKids_A_new_test_of_face_memory_for_children.html

Kirsten A. Dalrymple, Sherryse Corrow, Albert Yonas and Brad Duchaine Developmental prosopagnosia in childhood. Cognitive Neuropsychology. 29:5-6, 393-418.  http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02643294.2012.722547#.UaRRDrU3B8E   http://www.faceblind.org/social_perception/papers/Dalrymple%20et%20al%202012%20CN.pdf

I’ve just found out about Brad Pitt and prosopagnosia

A CNN news article about Brad Pitt and his suspicions about prosopagnosia came out on Friday. I’ve only just found out about Brad Pitt and face recognition issues. I’m amazed. There is speculation about how he visually recognizes his partner actor Angelina Jolie. Perhaps Mr Pitt just consistently approaches the most beautiful woman in the room. I guess you can do that when you look as gorgeous as Mr Pitt.

Note the photos and notes in the CNN article about many other famous prosopagnosics, including Australia’s beloved Dr Karl and Victoria, Crown Princess of Sweden. A disability in face memory isn’t the only difficulty in life that Crown Princess Victoria has had to contend with. She is also a dyslexic and won a battle against anorexia in the 1990s. According to the CNN article, Brad Pitt has been invited to go to Carnegie Mellon University to see Prof Marlene Behrmann and be tested for face-blindness or prosopagnosia and to have his brain imaged. That’s his decision to make. Prof Behrmann does appear to be an expert in the area of face recognition. I would cite Dr Brad Duchaine as another world-class expert.

I don’t see anything wrong with Prof Behrmann’s offer, but a celebrity shouldn’t feel that he has to make a public show of getting diagnosed with something. I guess Mr Pitt has seen the positive impact that his partner’s recent sharing of medical information has made. Perhaps he feels that he would like to also share and go public about a personal issue, and have a professor check out his lobes and gyri and white matter. Perhaps Mr Pitt feels that his apparent difficulty with face memory has alienated so many people that he must now seek and offer a public explanation of why he hasn’t recognized people. Being diagnosed as a prosopagnosic in a consultation that is reported in press releases would appear to be a solution. Finding out whether or not you are a super-recognizer of faces or a prosopagnosic can also be done privately and at no cost. The short version of the Cambridge Face Memory Test used to be freely available on the internet for anyone to complete in the privacy of their own home, with access to their own score. In my opinion, no one should have to volunteer to have their brain scanned or be studied as a single case or be studied as one of many research subjects just to get access to scientifically sound face memory testing and one’s own test results. I also don’t think anyone should have to pay a consultation fee to see someone with letters after their name just to get access to testing. Good face memory tests can be and have been offered freely over the internet. Governments subsidize public access to important health-related information resources on the internet, and I don’t see why face recognition tests should be any different.

I can’t believe that I’ve just written a post about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and a beautiful princess who once had an eating disorder. It just isn’t the kind of thing that I do.

CNN Staff Does Brad Pitt suffer from face blindness? CNN May 24, 2013.  http://edition.cnn.com/2013/05/23/showbiz/celebrity-news-gossip/brad-pitt-esquire-face-blindness/index.html

Tom Junod A life so large. Esquire. June/July 2013.  http://www.esquire.com/features/brad-pitt-cover-interview-0613

Shilo Rea News Brief: Carnegie Mellon Invites Brad Pitt To Campus For Face Blindness Diagnosis, Research. Carnegie Mellon News. May 23rd 2013.  http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2013/may/may22_faceblindness.html

Princess Victoria’s face confession. Female First. February 13th 2008.  http://www.femalefirst.co.uk/royal_family/Princess+Victoria-48079.html