Who are the “super physiognomists” who can recognize a face after decades?

Some have faces we don’t forget, others can’t forget a face. It is to this category that those who are called super physiognomists belong, that is, people capable of remembering the faces of the people they meet and almost never forget them, even decades later. Researchers from the University of New South Wales (Australia) were published on November 16, 2020 in the journal Plos One the results of a test to identify these people.

An infallible memory of faces

Super Physiognomy is a skill possessed by only 2% of the world’s population. With the test it offers and has been available for free on the internet since 2017, the University of New South Wales claims to be able to provide a more accurate classification of super physiognomists. According to her, her test is more accurate than the Glasgow Face Matching Test and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

The researchers deliberately made this test difficult, which explains the rather low average performance, unlike other tests where candidates’ performance is more consistent across the measurement scale. Of the 31,000 people who have taken this test since 2017, none have managed to achieve a score of 100%, with the best result to date of 97%.

“When people take the test, they find that it’s really hard with most people scoring 50-60%, says James Dunn, postdoctoral research fellow at the University of New South Wales. But super physiognomists are people who get 70% or more. We made it difficult so that it wasn’t too easy for the best super physiognomists.“

A growing interest in this type of profile

For years, the scientific community has believed that facial recognition skills could be taught to help people working in law enforcement make more accurate judgments about a person’s identity. However, if this was unsuccessful as the Super Physiognomists’ skills cannot be learned, they still opened a gap. Researchers now believe that this extreme ability is encoded in our DNA. “VSWhat we found is that facial recognition varies naturally, as does IQ. And just like IQ, it appears that much of this variance is genetically determined.“, Explains James Dunn.

Super physiognomists interest scientists for two reasons. The first is that understanding this mechanism will help research better understand what happens in our brains when we see familiar and unfamiliar faces and how we distinguish them. The second is the growing interest in our societies for this type of profile, which is of particular interest to government agencies (police, immigration, intelligence).