Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
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What challenges do people face with facial recognition?
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. If you're like me, you know this feeling. Maybe you're at a party or you're walking down the street, and suddenly, out of a sea of passing faces, one of them lights up, looking right at you. This person starts waving, says hello. This person is glad to see you. And you? You have no idea who you're looking at. Recognizing faces is a crucial skill. But although your mind is amazing at identifying your boyfriend or your child in a crowd, there are important limits to this ability. Some of us, like me, are extremely bad at it. Some of us are terrific. Today, we bring you a classic Hidden Brain episode about people on opposite ends of the facial recognition spectrum.
We'll also explore how our ability to recognize faces has broad implications in our lives. And then, in the second part of today's show, we're going to bring you another look at facial recognition from the Revisionist History podcast. If you're unfamiliar with the show, Revisionist History is best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell's podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. The show has covered everything from what Americans get wrong about guns to how English muffins get their signature nooks and crannies. It turns out that Malcolm, like me, struggles with recognizing faces. His producer, Lucy Sullivan, on the other hand, is exceptionally good at it. And Lucy wanted to find out what's going on, or isn't going on, in our brains when we see someone we know.
Revisionist History
We'll start with someone whose job requires her to be quick with faces. She's a cop.
My name's Alison Young and I'm a police officer in the Metropolitan Police in London.
She started out several years ago working on response teams in East London. These are the cops who mostly just respond to 911 calls. Then, about three and a half years into that job, she and a bunch of her fellow officers were invited to take a series of tests at a university.
You get given like three or four different faces. And you have to memorize those faces.
Then a new screen appears with other faces. These ones are obscured in some way or heavily pixelated. One of the faces you saw earlier might now show up wearing a beard.
So you have to try and work out which one of the faces is the face that you've seen before. And it's that kind of thing.
The test, of course, was measuring how good officers were at recognising faces. A while later, Alison received her results. She came in second out of all the officers. And they asked me to come down to Scotland Yard. Scotland Yard, of course, is the headquarters for London Police. When she got there, she was told she was being added to a new unit they were forming. It was called the Super Recogniser Unit.
Yes, that's the name that they've given me.
Do you feel like a super recognizer?
I don't know. Well, I guess so, but I don't think I'd necessarily say that a lot because it's just the word super, isn't it? It just sounds a bit super. I don't know.
It's just the notion of the word super kind of brings out as if we're some sort of superhero or something like that, whereas that isn't the case.
In other words, don't picture Superman leaping tall buildings in a single bound. Picture instead a bunch of cops sitting in front of computers. Members of the super recognisers unit would be given the faces of criminal suspects and then try, in essence, to play a matching game.
Well, they're the catalogue of criminals, essentially, that are wanted by police. And what they decided to develop was a thing called snapping, which meant that we may not know who that person is, but... If I look at this face, number one photo on this chart, and then I continue to go through further and further and further through different photos, can I find him in any other photos that he's wanted for? Which then means that we've got him for one offence of, I don't know, theft. We find him for another offence to do with theft. And you end up accruing this one person for around 25 to 30 different crimes.
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