Woo Hoo! A test specifically for super-recognizers from CBS 60 Minutes

Are you a “super-recognizer”? Take a test. 60 Minutes. CBS News. March 18, 2012. http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7402555n&tag=segementExtraScroller;housing

158 interesting comments here:  http://www.cbsnews.com/8601-504803_162-57399111.html?assetTypeId=41&blogId=10391709&tag=postComments;commentWrapper

I think the test presented in this video is an excerpt from the Before They Were Famous Test, a test which I’ve been trying to gain access to since September 2010. The full test has 56 photos of famous people, with super-recognizers typically correctly identifying less than 32 of those, so it is certainly a test to sort out people at the highest end of the spectrum of ability. There are a total of 17 photos of famous British or American people presented in this video. Out of the 17 I was totally unfamiliar with 6 of the famous people (I’ve lived in Australia all my life and have limited interest in recent and obscure US celebrities). I never knew them from a bar of soap. Of the 11 celebrities whom I am familiar with, I identified 5 of them correctly while doing the test at the same pace as the video playing, missing 6 of the famous faces that I do know. I think I could have picked the face of Nancy Reagan if her face had been shown in a close-up, not a long-shot, a few seconds before the video revealed her identity. As soon as someone tells you who a known person is in a photo it is usually impossible not to see who they are, so I didn’t count Nancy Reagan as a hit. Her face is very distinctive, even as a young girl. I don’t think I can conclude anything much about me from my score, because as an Aussie I don’t think my score can be compared with American people taking the test, but it was a bit of fun.

The video features Jennifer Jarett tackling the test in fine form. I’m pretty sure that she was one of the first a super-recognisers to be identified by science, in a journal paper published in 2009. She has also been the subject of a 2009 article in the New York Times.

If you think you might be a super-recognizer and you also wish to do testing to see if this is true, I believe you would need to do both the full Before They Were Famous Test (with the caution that cultural differences might affect your score) and also the clinically credible Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT), prefereably the long form, which was created by researchers from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts and University College in London. The short form of the CFMT was once freely available to do at a number of places on the internet, but now I believe this autism study at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) is the only place where you might access it for free: http://facetoface.mit.edu/

Interesting stuff from the New York Times from late last year about prosopagnosia and another condition that I’d not heard of – phonagnosia

Have We Met? Tracing Face Blindness to Its Roots by Karen Barrow New York Times December 26, 2011   http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/health/views/face-and-voice-recognition-may-be-linked-in-the-brain-research-suggests.html?_r=2

this is the study mentioned in the above article:

Direct Structural Connections between Voice- and Face-Recognition Areas. Helen Blank, Alfred Anwander, and Katharina von Kriegstein Journal of Neuroscience. 7 September 2011,31(36): 12906-12915; doi: 10.1523/​JNEUROSCI.2091-11.2011  http://www.jneurosci.org/content/31/36/12906.abstract?sid=2704774c-0cbd-4342-9b75-639b388b99f9

and this is the video featuring Dori Frame that goes with the article:

Faceless produced by Almudena Toral New York Times December 2011 http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/12/26/health/100000000958226/faceless.html