6 ms·

'Super Recognizers' Like Me

34 points by aaron695 6y ago

airstrike 6y ago
Amazing skill. Congrats and all but do color me scared.
- riffic 6y ago
  It's not skill, it's pure woo. I'm not impressed.
aaron695 6y ago
I think John le Carre had a character who did this? An older women who worked admin for MI6 and did all the unknown id's. It might be been a different author. But it was written in the 90's at the latest.
- aaron695 6y ago
  "It is the almost hilarious case, but perfectly true, that while the CIA "cousins" use banks of computers in which are stored millions and millions of facial features to try to match up the incoming daily flow of photographs, Britain uses Blodwyn. An elderly and often ill-used lady, forever harassed by her younger male colleagues for a quick identification, Blodwyn has been in the job forty years and works underneath Sentinel House, where she presides over the huge archive of pictures that make up MI6's "mug book." Not a book at all, it is in fact a cavernous vault where are stored rows and rows of volumes of photographs, of which Blodwyn alone possesses an encyclopedic knowledge. Her mind is something like the CIA's computer bank, which she can occasionally defeat. In her memory is stored not the tiniest detail of the Thirty Years' War or even the Wall Street stock prices; her mind stores faces. Shapes of noses, lines of jaws, casts of eyes; the sag of a cheek, the curve of a lip, the way a glass or cigarette is held, the glint of a capped tooth in a smile taken in an Australian pub and showing up years later in a London supermarket--all are grist to the mill of her remarkable memory." (The Fourth Protocol, Frederick Forsyth, 1984.)
- vmilner 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connie_Sachs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connie_Sachs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milicent_Bagot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milicent_Bagot
autarch 6y ago
There's a test linked to see if you might be a super recognizer. It only used Caucasian faces. Insert epic facepalm here.
- croissants 6y ago
  After doing the first test, I got a link to a second test of 50 faces, almost all of which were not Caucasian. So I'm not sure what's happening here.
  - autarch 6y ago
    Ah, that's good. I just did the first test. I wasn't up for the longer version.
- bagels 6y ago
  https://greenwichuniversity.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_e3xDuCccGAdgbfT?Source=Website https://greenwichuniversity.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_e3x... So you don't have to hunt for it too.
  - searchableguy 6y ago
    That was one boring "research" survey. I skimped through the first one and got 14 out of 14 and in the second one, I slept through it. Just clicked on slider at random without looking. Seems flawed.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - marktangotango 6y ago
    > It happened so often that I just thought I took more notice of people and I was completely forgettable. I‘ve felt like this my entire life. The test says I might be a super recognizer, better than being forgettable I guess!
  - axaxs 6y ago
    Did you do the test? It seemed very basic and simple, to me. I got 13/14 which it says 'may be a superrecognizer', but I definitely don't think I am, so assume the test isn't much good. Curious to know how others fare.
austinkhale 6y ago
The article reads a lot like a PR piece. The 100% accuracy claim in particular seems... unlikely.
- sdenton4 6y ago
  Forensics loves junk science... https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/the-wear-patterns-of-your-jeans-arent-good-forensic-evidence/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/the-wear-patterns-of...
- notduncansmith 6y ago
  It reads like a landing page, right down to the call-to-action at the bottom. Also just noticed an article on the front page talking about Portland’s ban on facial recognition technology - so this might be a well-timed advertisement for the service.
- aaron695 6y ago
  What she is saying is, when she does recognise someone it's binary. There's no maybe. I take it as her trying to explain how her brain works around facial recognition. I don't read it as her claiming to be 100% accurate. Not saying she isn't lying in general though. "Are you always accurate? Yes, I just know 100 percent. You don’t have a situation where you go, “I think that might be matey from my old job”. It’s really solid and definite."
- dorkwood 6y ago
  I agree. She answers questions like she's being tested. I wouldn't be surprised if she needed to get approval from her boss before emailing her responses back to Vice. "Do you feel nervous when you’re doing these covert operations? Not nervous, I feel invigorated, excited and absolutely determined to do the job. We don’t always find people when we’re deployed but I can say that those people have never come past us either. That’s just as good for the venues or events organizers. We cover big gigs at arenas too. The last one I did was Slipknot. We had someone deployed at every entrance of the arena. We scanned thousands of faces and they’re all irrelevant, until that one person comes past and your hairs go up on the back of your neck and you know it’s them."
w_for_wumbo 6y ago
They didn't answer the question that I wanted to know, what about identical twins, can she distinguish between them?
- latortuga 6y ago
  I'm sure they can. I grew up with identical twin mother and aunt and while many people regularly mixed them up, I never had an issue. I always thought it was quite obvious. So my suspicion is that whatever it is that I could see due to familiarity, is likely what super recognizers can see immediately.
  - setr 6y ago
    Ditto; I had a couple friends that were identical friends, and it only took a few days of interaction I think to start consistently differentiating them -- and I have terrible memory of people. They're identical for the most part, but there's always obvious cues; how they walk, different expressions/reactions, different tones when talking, slightly different slang, etc. It's like a deterministic lockstep game that desynchronized when they were born -- the desync slowly but surely cascades.
IIAOPSW 6y ago
Any mechanism (biological or otherwise) for seeing patterns in limited information is sure to also see a lot of erroneous patterns. Furthermore if one part of the brain is often seeing patterns that aren't there, other parts of the brain are likely doing the same. For this reason, I wonder if being a 'super recognizer' is correlated with schizophrenia.
- keenmaster 6y ago
  >seeing patterns in limited information is sure to also see a lot of erroneous patterns I don't think that the brain uses general pattern recognition on faces, but rather a distinct and specialized facial processing module. Without reading more about super-recognizers, my guess is that their facial processing module is OP. These people will never forget or confuse a face in the same way that you will basically never confuse your mom for someone else, except for a split second in edge cases. We don't worry about confusing our mom for someone else.
  - IIAOPSW 6y ago
    Specialized or not, if you're looking at fleeting, grainy CCTV footage then you are extrapolating a pattern over the missing information. Any extrapolation that works on less information must come at the cost of higher error. I concede it is possible that this brain difference is restricted to one specific lobe that does one specific task, but what are the odds of such a freakishly specific mutation? I have a uncle with schizophrenia. He frequently opens the door before you ring the bell. He draws the conclusion that someone is there from very subtle sound cues on the other side of the wall. This all sounds very impressive until you realize how many times a day he opens the door and no one is on the other side. The ability to draw remarkable conclusions from scant evidence comes at the cost of high false positives to the point where he hears voices in background sounds. It would not surprise me if the biological mechanism of being a "super recognizer" is similar.
  - dmd 6y ago
    How much of that is context, though? I certainly wouldn't (and haven't) recognize my mom or my wife or anyone else, really, in the wrong context when I wasn't expecting to see them.
nayuki 6y ago
I first heard of the concept of super-recognizers from this documentary video from Australia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6AVF0GhxNk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6AVF0GhxNk "Passport Problem | Testing out fake passport | Tricking passport scanner"
saeranv 6y ago
I've been fascinated by the mechanisms behind human facial recognition ever since I read Peter Watts 'Blindsight'. Near the end he introduces an idea similar to the Chernoff face[1], plots of multivariate data in the shape of a human face. The idea is that humans are so keyed into recognizing subtle nuances in facial expressions, we're better at interpreting mulitvariate data graphed as a facial expression. Some interesting parts from this interview: - She surprisingly claims that she's not good at recognizing emotions. - She can recognize adults based on how they looked as children. This suggests there's a sort of 'fuzzing' process that allows her to interpolate aging. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernoff_face https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernoff_face
jsemrau 6y ago
Reminds me of William Gibsons Iduro's Colin Laney. Likely we will see more of these newly type of jobs going forward.
tzs 6y ago
I remember listening to something on my local public radio station (KUOW) once, I'd guess on "This American Life" or "Hidden Brain" but I'm not sure, about extremes of human memory and related things. They talked about two people who were at opposite ends of facial memory ability. There was a woman who had total face blindness. She could tell she was looking at a face, but could not recall who it belonged to. If you had her boyfriend walk out of the room she was in, and then come back in with a couple other people dressed the same as him, she could not tell by sight which one was her boyfriend. The other person had perfect facial memory. For example, if some random stranger at an airport asked him what time it was, and then ten years later he was introduced to that same person at, say, a party, he'd recognize instantly that they asked him the time ten years ago at the airport. They say opposites attract, and in this case there was some truth to that--the man with perfect facial memory was also the boyfriend of the woman with total face blindness.
lawlessone 6y ago
I passed some university test for this "superpower" a few years ago. A lot of it was just recognising faces they'd previously shown me from very fuzzy images. Overall i got the impression they wanted insight into training an AI. I still get the odd email asking me to participate , in more studies (i did one or two more)but i ignore them now because of the above, and it's an unrewarding time sink. It was actually the same test that is linked in the article and here.
JackMorgan 6y ago
I'm certain I have the ability to super recognize people from audio and smell, but not visual. I'm very nearly face blind, and can hardly remember close people's faces. Usually I can detect a voice actor from a single spoken word, or which co-worker walked down a given hall just from sense of smell. The audio one is hard to explain, almost like I can visualize their voice thumbprint, hearing each aspect of intonation, syllable spacing, and cadence. It's so clear I can often see it matching over other words by the same person. Rarely an actor might put on an accent good enough I don't "recognize" them, and it's deeply unsettling, like an acustic uncanny valley, hearing the wrong voice on top of a face. I went without glasses for almost six months when I was little before my parents realized, so I've always wondered if my audio and olfactory centers just overdeveloped.
RickJWagner 6y ago
Amazing! I fear I have the opposite. I try really hard, but I can't remember faces or especially names. Until I really get to know someone, I'm not quite certain who I'm dealing with. It's a curse.

34 points by aaron695 6y ago

airstrike 6y ago

Amazing skill. Congrats and all but do color me scared.

riffic 6y ago
It's not skill, it's pure woo. I'm not impressed.

aaron695 6y ago

I think John le Carre had a character who did this? An older women who worked admin for MI6 and did all the unknown id's. It might be been a different author. But it was written in the 90's at the latest.

aaron695 6y ago
"It is the almost hilarious case, but perfectly true, that while the CIA "cousins" use banks of computers in which are stored millions and millions of facial features to try to match up the incoming daily flow of photographs, Britain uses Blodwyn. An elderly and often ill-used lady, forever harassed by her younger male colleagues for a quick identification, Blodwyn has been in the job forty years and works underneath Sentinel House, where she presides over the huge archive of pictures that make up MI6's "mug book." Not a book at all, it is in fact a cavernous vault where are stored rows and rows of volumes of photographs, of which Blodwyn alone possesses an encyclopedic knowledge. Her mind is something like the CIA's computer bank, which she can occasionally defeat. In her memory is stored not the tiniest detail of the Thirty Years' War or even the Wall Street stock prices; her mind stores faces. Shapes of noses, lines of jaws, casts of eyes; the sag of a cheek, the curve of a lip, the way a glass or cigarette is held, the glint of a capped tooth in a smile taken in an Australian pub and showing up years later in a London supermarket--all are grist to the mill of her remarkable memory." (The Fourth Protocol, Frederick Forsyth, 1984.)
vmilner 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connie_Sachs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connie_Sachs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milicent_Bagot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milicent_Bagot

autarch 6y ago

There's a test linked to see if you might be a super recognizer. It only used Caucasian faces. Insert epic facepalm here.

croissants 6y ago
After doing the first test, I got a link to a second test of 50 faces, almost all of which were not Caucasian. So I'm not sure what's happening here.
- autarch 6y ago
  Ah, that's good. I just did the first test. I wasn't up for the longer version.
bagels 6y ago
https://greenwichuniversity.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_e3xDuCccGAdgbfT?Source=Website https://greenwichuniversity.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_e3x... So you don't have to hunt for it too.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  That was one boring "research" survey. I skimped through the first one and got 14 out of 14 and in the second one, I slept through it. Just clicked on slider at random without looking. Seems flawed.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- marktangotango 6y ago
  > It happened so often that I just thought I took more notice of people and I was completely forgettable. I‘ve felt like this my entire life. The test says I might be a super recognizer, better than being forgettable I guess!
- axaxs 6y ago
  Did you do the test? It seemed very basic and simple, to me. I got 13/14 which it says 'may be a superrecognizer', but I definitely don't think I am, so assume the test isn't much good. Curious to know how others fare.

austinkhale 6y ago

The article reads a lot like a PR piece. The 100% accuracy claim in particular seems... unlikely.

sdenton4 6y ago
Forensics loves junk science... https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/the-wear-patterns-of-your-jeans-arent-good-forensic-evidence/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/the-wear-patterns-of...
notduncansmith 6y ago
It reads like a landing page, right down to the call-to-action at the bottom. Also just noticed an article on the front page talking about Portland’s ban on facial recognition technology - so this might be a well-timed advertisement for the service.
aaron695 6y ago
What she is saying is, when she does recognise someone it's binary. There's no maybe. I take it as her trying to explain how her brain works around facial recognition. I don't read it as her claiming to be 100% accurate. Not saying she isn't lying in general though. "Are you always accurate? Yes, I just know 100 percent. You don’t have a situation where you go, “I think that might be matey from my old job”. It’s really solid and definite."
dorkwood 6y ago
I agree. She answers questions like she's being tested. I wouldn't be surprised if she needed to get approval from her boss before emailing her responses back to Vice. "Do you feel nervous when you’re doing these covert operations? Not nervous, I feel invigorated, excited and absolutely determined to do the job. We don’t always find people when we’re deployed but I can say that those people have never come past us either. That’s just as good for the venues or events organizers. We cover big gigs at arenas too. The last one I did was Slipknot. We had someone deployed at every entrance of the arena. We scanned thousands of faces and they’re all irrelevant, until that one person comes past and your hairs go up on the back of your neck and you know it’s them."

w_for_wumbo 6y ago

They didn't answer the question that I wanted to know, what about identical twins, can she distinguish between them?

latortuga 6y ago
I'm sure they can. I grew up with identical twin mother and aunt and while many people regularly mixed them up, I never had an issue. I always thought it was quite obvious. So my suspicion is that whatever it is that I could see due to familiarity, is likely what super recognizers can see immediately.
- setr 6y ago
  Ditto; I had a couple friends that were identical friends, and it only took a few days of interaction I think to start consistently differentiating them -- and I have terrible memory of people. They're identical for the most part, but there's always obvious cues; how they walk, different expressions/reactions, different tones when talking, slightly different slang, etc. It's like a deterministic lockstep game that desynchronized when they were born -- the desync slowly but surely cascades.

IIAOPSW 6y ago

Any mechanism (biological or otherwise) for seeing patterns in limited information is sure to also see a lot of erroneous patterns. Furthermore if one part of the brain is often seeing patterns that aren't there, other parts of the brain are likely doing the same. For this reason, I wonder if being a 'super recognizer' is correlated with schizophrenia.

keenmaster 6y ago
>seeing patterns in limited information is sure to also see a lot of erroneous patterns I don't think that the brain uses general pattern recognition on faces, but rather a distinct and specialized facial processing module. Without reading more about super-recognizers, my guess is that their facial processing module is OP. These people will never forget or confuse a face in the same way that you will basically never confuse your mom for someone else, except for a split second in edge cases. We don't worry about confusing our mom for someone else.
- IIAOPSW 6y ago
  Specialized or not, if you're looking at fleeting, grainy CCTV footage then you are extrapolating a pattern over the missing information. Any extrapolation that works on less information must come at the cost of higher error. I concede it is possible that this brain difference is restricted to one specific lobe that does one specific task, but what are the odds of such a freakishly specific mutation? I have a uncle with schizophrenia. He frequently opens the door before you ring the bell. He draws the conclusion that someone is there from very subtle sound cues on the other side of the wall. This all sounds very impressive until you realize how many times a day he opens the door and no one is on the other side. The ability to draw remarkable conclusions from scant evidence comes at the cost of high false positives to the point where he hears voices in background sounds. It would not surprise me if the biological mechanism of being a "super recognizer" is similar.
- dmd 6y ago
  How much of that is context, though? I certainly wouldn't (and haven't) recognize my mom or my wife or anyone else, really, in the wrong context when I wasn't expecting to see them.

nayuki 6y ago

I first heard of the concept of super-recognizers from this documentary video from Australia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6AVF0GhxNk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6AVF0GhxNk "Passport Problem | Testing out fake passport | Tricking passport scanner"

saeranv 6y ago

I've been fascinated by the mechanisms behind human facial recognition ever since I read Peter Watts 'Blindsight'. Near the end he introduces an idea similar to the Chernoff face[1], plots of multivariate data in the shape of a human face. The idea is that humans are so keyed into recognizing subtle nuances in facial expressions, we're better at interpreting mulitvariate data graphed as a facial expression. Some interesting parts from this interview: - She surprisingly claims that she's not good at recognizing emotions. - She can recognize adults based on how they looked as children. This suggests there's a sort of 'fuzzing' process that allows her to interpolate aging. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernoff_face https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernoff_face

jsemrau 6y ago

Reminds me of William Gibsons Iduro's Colin Laney. Likely we will see more of these newly type of jobs going forward.

tzs 6y ago

I remember listening to something on my local public radio station (KUOW) once, I'd guess on "This American Life" or "Hidden Brain" but I'm not sure, about extremes of human memory and related things. They talked about two people who were at opposite ends of facial memory ability. There was a woman who had total face blindness. She could tell she was looking at a face, but could not recall who it belonged to. If you had her boyfriend walk out of the room she was in, and then come back in with a couple other people dressed the same as him, she could not tell by sight which one was her boyfriend. The other person had perfect facial memory. For example, if some random stranger at an airport asked him what time it was, and then ten years later he was introduced to that same person at, say, a party, he'd recognize instantly that they asked him the time ten years ago at the airport. They say opposites attract, and in this case there was some truth to that--the man with perfect facial memory was also the boyfriend of the woman with total face blindness.

lawlessone 6y ago

I passed some university test for this "superpower" a few years ago. A lot of it was just recognising faces they'd previously shown me from very fuzzy images. Overall i got the impression they wanted insight into training an AI. I still get the odd email asking me to participate , in more studies (i did one or two more)but i ignore them now because of the above, and it's an unrewarding time sink. It was actually the same test that is linked in the article and here.

JackMorgan 6y ago

I'm certain I have the ability to super recognize people from audio and smell, but not visual. I'm very nearly face blind, and can hardly remember close people's faces. Usually I can detect a voice actor from a single spoken word, or which co-worker walked down a given hall just from sense of smell. The audio one is hard to explain, almost like I can visualize their voice thumbprint, hearing each aspect of intonation, syllable spacing, and cadence. It's so clear I can often see it matching over other words by the same person. Rarely an actor might put on an accent good enough I don't "recognize" them, and it's deeply unsettling, like an acustic uncanny valley, hearing the wrong voice on top of a face. I went without glasses for almost six months when I was little before my parents realized, so I've always wondered if my audio and olfactory centers just overdeveloped.

RickJWagner 6y ago

Amazing! I fear I have the opposite. I try really hard, but I can't remember faces or especially names. Until I really get to know someone, I'm not quite certain who I'm dealing with. It's a curse.