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You can take this test to see if you’re a ‘super recognizer’ of faces
08.24.2016
01:55 pm
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Boing Boing just hipped me to this online test to see if you’re a “super recognizer” of faces. Josh P. Davis, a psychology professor at the University of Greenwich in England who studies the “super recognizer” phenomenon, says that about 1% of the population can actually do this.

I think of myself as pretty good at remembering faces. I almost never forget a face. An ex-boyfriend used to tell me all the time “You should work for the CIA!” (Full disclosure: I’m terrible at remembering names.)

Via Science Alert:

In 2009, a team of neuroscientists from Harvard did one of the first studies of super-recognisers. In it, they looked at just four people who claimed to have an unusually good ability to recognise faces.

All four subjects told the researchers about instances when they’d recognised practical strangers: family members they hadn’t seen for decades or actors they’d glimpsed once in an ad and then seen again in a movie. They felt like there was something wrong with them.

One of the people in the study told the researchers that she tried to hide her ability and “pretend that I don’t remember [people] ... because it seems like I stalk them, or that they mean more to me than they do.”

I took the test and got 12 out of 14 correct. According to my results, “If you scored above 10 you may be a super recogniser, but you would need to do more tests to find this out.”

Of course I was interested in the next test and clicked on the link to to take it. It’s over an hour long. Boo! I can’t commit to that right now, but I might do it later. I’m curious as to if I’m a “super recognizer” or not. Not sure I wanna work for the CIA, though. I want cash and prizes.

Posted by Tara McGinley
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08.24.2016
01:55 pm
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