Super-Recognisers - Page 11

C2 Proficiency · Gapped Text · Ready for C2 Proficiency Student's Book, Macmillan

You are going to read an article about people who are exceptionally good at remembering faces. Seven paragraphs have been removed from the article. Choose from the paragraphs A–H the one which fits each gap (1–7). There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.

Once though, while working at a part-time job at a clothing store, Seo had good cause to deploy her special ability. Staff were shown grainy, hard-to-decipher CCTV footage of a habitual shoplifter; the next time this person entered the shop, Seo instantly recognised them and alerted the security guard.

A recent experiment, which used eye-tracking technology, may shed some light on the matter. White observed that super-recognisers spread their 'gaze more around the face, which suggests they might be painting a more elaborate picture of the face in their mind's eye.'

In fact, most of us are quite adept at recognising the faces of people we know well, no matter how pixelated or grainy a picture may be. Matching unfamiliar faces, though, can be surprisingly challenging even under optimal conditions, and this is problematic because many important tasks depend on this very skill – matching a traveller to their passport or a CCTV image to a police mugshot.

Seo was unaware that others didn't share her love of the private game she played, where she'd spot a person on a bus or the street and then flick through the vast catalogue of faces she kept in her head, trying to place where she'd seen them before. 'Especially as a child, I remember just really enjoying looking at different faces.'

So, what about you? Have you also questioned your sanity after recognising a stranger whom you passed on the street years before? Perhaps you easily rattle off a list of movies where you've seen a particular extra, only to be met by blank stares.

He began to question this while studying a rare condition called prosopagnosia – when a brain injury leaves someone unable to recognise faces. He was intrigued that while people with this condition couldn't recognise the face of a loved one, they could still recognise other objects.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the existence of super-recognisers has not gone unnoticed by law enforcement agencies, which have started to actively recruit people with superior facial recognition capabilities. London's metropolitan police, for example, has a special team who examine CCTV footage from crime scenes, and several years ago Queensland police started identifying super-recognisers in its ranks.

Most people fall somewhere in the middle, but a few possess either an exceptionally good or weak ability to identify faces. The 1–2% of the population at the very top are 'super-recognisers' – people who only need the briefest glimpse to memorise a face, and who can then store that information for months, years, or even the rest of their lives.

As a child, Yenny Seo often surprised her mother by pointing out a stranger in the grocery store, remarking it was the same person they passed on the street a few weeks earlier. Likewise, when they watched a movie together, Seo would often recognise 'extras' who'd appeared fleetingly in other films. Her mother never thought this was 'anything special', Seo says, and simply assumed she had a particularly observant daughter.

It was only as she started using social media that Seo became self-conscious of her skill. 'I would start a new class in uni or I would meet people through social gatherings and I would remember visually what kind of photos I'd seen them in. I'd already be so familiar with them and I'd know in my head: "Oh, you are that person's sibling, or you used to date so-and-so,"' she says. 'But I also knew it'd be really creepy if I said that out loud, so I'd keep it on the down low and just say: "Oh, nice to meet you."'

Until the early 2000s, little scientific attention was paid to whether all humans possess the same ability to recognise faces. According to Dr David White, now a lead investigator at the Face Research Lab at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), 'I think intuitively people believe that the way they see the world is the same as others. And I think that scientists had that intuition as well.'

It may be, he says, that our brains are organised to perform different tasks, 'like an app on your smartphone.' Along with other researchers, White started examining people without impairments, discovering there is 'tremendous variation' in facial recognition ability. From their research, experts have concluded that facial recognition ability lies along a bell curve, like IQ and other human capacities.

The underlying cause is still not entirely clear – it's a new field, with only around 20 scientific papers studying super-recognisers. However, it is suspected that genetics plays a role because identical twins show similar performance, and it has been shown that cortical thickness – the number of neurons – in the part of the brain that supports face recognition is a predictor of superior ability. So it appears that certain people like Seo are born with a superpower, as if they were a character in a comic book. But how exactly does this superpower work?

Because this is such a rare phenomenon, in 2017 White and his colleagues at UNSW designed a publicly available online screening tool to try to unearth the world's best super-recognisers. When Seo – then in her mid-20s, gave it a go – her score was so high that White invited her to come to Sydney for more testing. With more than 100,000 people now tested, Seo still ranks in the top 50.

For her part, Seo is perfectly happy with her job as a technician at a pathology lab. However, the diagnosis from White did help her see her abilities in a new light. 'It made me realise: oh yeah, it's not crazy – I must have been right the whole time. It's not that I'm creepy, but my brain is just wired that way.'

If so, Dr White and his colleagues at the Face Research Lab at UNSW would be delighted to hear from you. Adapted from The Guardian

As a child, Yenny Seo often surprised her mother by pointing out a stranger in the grocery store, remarking it was the same person they passed on the street a few weeks earlier. Likewise, when they watched a movie together, Seo would often recognise 'extras' who'd appeared fleetingly in other films. Her mother never thought this was 'anything special', Seo says, and simply assumed she had a particularly observant daughter. ___ It was only as she started using social media that Seo became self-conscious of her skill. 'I would start a new class in uni or I would meet people through social gatherings and I would remember visually what kind of photos I'd seen them in. I'd already be so familiar with them and I'd know in my head: "Oh, you are that person's sibling, or you used to date so-and-so,"' she says. 'But I also knew it'd be really creepy if I said that out loud, so I'd keep it on the down low and just say: "Oh, nice to meet you."' ___ Until the early 2000s, little scientific attention was paid to whether all humans possess the same ability to recognise faces. According to Dr David White, now a lead investigator at the Face Research Lab at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), 'I think intuitively people believe that the way they see the world is the same as others. And I think that scientists had that intuition as well.' ___ It may be, he says, that our brains are organised to perform different tasks, 'like an app on your smartphone.' Along with other researchers, White started examining people without impairments, discovering there is 'tremendous variation' in facial recognition ability. From their research, experts have concluded that facial recognition ability lies along a bell curve, like IQ and other human capacities. ___ The underlying cause is still not entirely clear – it's a new field, with only around 20 scientific papers studying super-recognisers. However, it is suspected that genetics plays a role because identical twins show similar performance, and it has been shown that cortical thickness – the number of neurons – in the part of the brain that supports face recognition is a predictor of superior ability. So it appears that certain people like Seo are born with a superpower, as if they were a character in a comic book. But how exactly does this superpower work? ___ Because this is such a rare phenomenon, in 2017 White and his colleagues at UNSW designed a publicly available online screening tool to try to unearth the world's best super-recognisers. When Seo – then in her mid-20s, gave it a go – her score was so high that White invited her to come to Sydney for more testing. With more than 100,000 people now tested, Seo still ranks in the top 50. ___ For her part, Seo is perfectly happy with her job as a technician at a pathology lab. However, the diagnosis from White did help her see her abilities in a new light. 'It made me realise: oh yeah, it's not crazy – I must have been right the whole time. It's not that I'm creepy, but my brain is just wired that way.' ___ If so, Dr White and his colleagues at the Face Research Lab at UNSW would be delighted to hear from you. Adapted from The Guardian

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