Familiar Faces (ScienceNews)

In a story about “super recognizers” — people who have an exceptional ability to remember faces — ScienceNews turns for comment to Dartmouth’s Bradley Duchaine.

Duchaine, an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences, and colleagues in England are studying super recognizers to understand how some people are able to recognize nearly everyone they’ve ever seen, the magazine writes. Knowledge gained from such studies may aid in police work and other fields that rely on identifying people by how they look, notes the magazine.

“By identifying strategies used by super recognizers, we may find ways to train others who have problems with face recognition, or help people who are in the normal range but have professional demands in which superior face recognition would be beneficial,” Duchaine tells ScienceNews.

Read the full story here, published 8/23/13 by ScienceNews.