Monthly Archives: May 2018

Disappointed but not surprised

I haven’t read the whole book, but as far as I can tell the new book Superhuman: Life at the Extremes of Mental and Physical Ability by Rowan Hooper does not discuss super-recognizers. It appears that in the chapter on memory the accuracy of eyewitness tesimony is critiqued just as it has been done before countless times, without focussing on the various elements of what goes into such testimony and memory, such as face recognition – a form of visual memory, episodic or autobiographical memory and sensory memory (smell, temperature, pain etc). Testing of the idea of eyewitness memory is done by testing people who can be assumed to have average or unknown levels of face memory ability, not including any known super-recognizers. I could be wrong as I’ve not read the whole book, and probably never will, but I don’t think so.