The worldwide public impact of identifying super-recognisers for police and business

Super-recognisers occupy the extreme top end of a wide spectrum of human face recognition ability. Although test scores provide evidence of super-recognisers’ quantitative superiority, their abilities may be driven by qualitatively different cognitive or neurological mechanisms. Some super-recognisers scoring exceptionally highly on multiple short-term face memory tests do not achieve superior performances on measures of simultaneous face matching, long term face memory and/or spotting faces in a crowd. Heterogeneous performance patterns have implications for police, security or business aiming to utilise super-recognisers’ superior skills. Drawing on a global participant base (n ≈ 6,000,000), as well as theory and empirical research, this paper describes the background, development, and employment of tests designed to measure four components of superior face processing to assist in recruitment and deployment decisions.