Browsing by Author "Dudfield, Gavin"

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    The consistency of superior face recognition skills in police officers
    (John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019-01-22) Bate, Sarah; Frowd, Charlie; Bennetts, Rachel; Hasshim, Nabil; Portch, Emma; Murray, Ebony; Dudfield, Gavin
    In recent years, there has been increasing interest in people with superior face recognition skills. Yet identification of these individuals has mostly relied on criterion performance on a single attempt at a single measure of face memory. The current investigation aimed to examine the consistency of superior face recognition skills in 30 police officers, both across tests that tap into the same process and between tests that tap into different components of face processing. Overall indices of performance across related measures were found to identify different superior performers to isolated test scores. Further, different top performers emerged for target‐present versus target‐absent indices, suggesting that signal detection measures are the most useful indicators of performance. Finally, a dissociation was observed between superior memory and matching performance. Super‐recognizer screening programmes should therefore include overall indices summarizing multiple attempts at related tests, allowing for individuals to rank highly on different (and sometimes very specific) tasks.
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    The limits of super recognition: An other-ethnicity effect in individuals with extraordinary face recognition skills.
    (American Psychological Association, 2018-12-20) Bate, Sarah; Bennetts, Rachel; Hasshim, Nabil; Portch, Emma; Murray, Ebony; Burns, Edwin; Dudfield, Gavin
    In the last decade there has been increasing interest in super-recognizers, who have an extraordinary ability to recognize faces. However, it has not yet been investigated whether these individuals are subject to the same biases in face recognition as typical perceivers. The most renowned constraint reported to date is the other-ethnicity effect, whereby people are better at recognizing faces from their own, compared with other, ethnicities. If super-recognizers also show this bias, it is possible that they are no better at other-ethnicity face recognition than typical native perceivers—a finding that would have important theoretical and practical implications. In the current study, eight Caucasian super-recognizers performed other-ethnicity tests of face memory and face matching. In Experiment 1, super-recognizers outperformed Caucasian but not Asian controls in their memory for Asian faces. In Experiment 2, a similar pattern emerged in some super-recognizers on a test of face matching. Finally, Experiment 3 examined the consistency of superior other-ethnicity face matching in relation to Caucasian controls, using Arab and Black faces. Only four super-recognizers consistently outperformed controls, and other-ethnicity matching performance was not related to Caucasian face-matching or own- or other-ethnicity face memory. These findings suggest that super-recognizers are subject to the same biases as typical perceivers, and are simply those at the top end of a common face recognition spectrum as opposed to a qualitatively different group of individuals.