ArticlePloS one2023
Selecting police super-recognisers.
Article in PloS one, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Too good to be true: Synthetic AI faces are more average than real faces and super-recognizers know it.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2026Article
- Training human super-recognizers' detection and discrimination of AI-generated faces.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Information sampling differences supporting superior face identity processing ability.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Normative face recognition ability test scores vary across online participant pools.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Different facets of age perception in people with developmental prosopagnosia and "super-recognisers".Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2024Article
- Jack of all trades, master of one: domain-specific and domain-general contributions to perceptual expertise in visual comparison.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2024Article
- Super recognizers: Increased sensitivity or reduced biases? Insights from serial dependence.Journal of vision · 2024Article
- Diverse types of expertise in facial recognition.Scientific reports · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
People vary in their ability to recognise faces. These individual differences are consistent over time, heritable and associated with brain anatomy. This implies that face identity processing can be improved in applied settings by selecting high performers-'super-recognisers' (SRs)-but these selection processes are rarely available for scientific scrutiny. Here we report an 'end-to-end' selection process used to establish an SR 'unit' in a large police force. Australian police officers (n = 1600) completed 3 standardised face identification tests and we recruited 38 SRs from this cohort to complete 10 follow-up tests. As a group, SRs were 20% better than controls in lab-based tests of face memory and matching, and equalled or surpassed accuracy of forensic specialists that currently perform face identification tasks for police. Individually, SR accuracy was variable but this problem was mitigated by adopting strict selection criteria. SRs' superior abilities transferred only partially to body identity decisions where the face was not visible, and they were no better than controls at deciding which visual scene that faces had initially been encountered in. Notwithstanding these important qualifications, we conclude that super-recognisers are an effective solution to improving face identity processing in applied settings.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.