TY - JOUR
T1 - Face recognition by metropolitan police super-recognisers
AU - Robertson, David J.
AU - Noyes, Eilidh
AU - Dowsett, Andrew J.
AU - Jenkins, Rob
AU - Burton, A. Mike
N1 - Funding Information:
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union?s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / ERC Grant Agreement n.323262, and from the Economic and Social Research Council, UK (ES/J022950/1). http:// erc.europa.eu/; http://www.esrc.ac.uk/. The funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. We are very grateful to Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville of the Metropolitan Police for allowing us access to his team.We also thank the four police Super Recognisers who took part in the studies reported here.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Robertson et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Copyright:
Copyright 2017 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2016/2
Y1 - 2016/2
N2 - Face recognition is used to prove identity across a wide variety of settings. Despite this, research consistently shows that people are typically rather poor at matching faces to photos. Some professional groups, such as police and passport officers, have been shown to perform just as poorly as the general public on standard tests of face recognition. However, face recognition skills are subject to wide individual variation, with some people showing exceptional ability-a group that has come to be known as 'super-recognisers'. The Metropolitan Police Force (London) recruits 'super-recognisers' from within its ranks, for deployment on various identification tasks. Here we test four working super-recognisers from within this police force, and ask whether they are really able to perform at levels above control groups. We consistently find that the police 'super-recognisers' perform at well above normal levels on tests of unfamiliar and familiar face matching, with degraded as well as high quality images. Recruiting employees with high levels of skill in these areas, and allocating them to relevant tasks, is an efficient way to overcome some of the known difficulties associated with unfamiliar face recognition.
AB - Face recognition is used to prove identity across a wide variety of settings. Despite this, research consistently shows that people are typically rather poor at matching faces to photos. Some professional groups, such as police and passport officers, have been shown to perform just as poorly as the general public on standard tests of face recognition. However, face recognition skills are subject to wide individual variation, with some people showing exceptional ability-a group that has come to be known as 'super-recognisers'. The Metropolitan Police Force (London) recruits 'super-recognisers' from within its ranks, for deployment on various identification tasks. Here we test four working super-recognisers from within this police force, and ask whether they are really able to perform at levels above control groups. We consistently find that the police 'super-recognisers' perform at well above normal levels on tests of unfamiliar and familiar face matching, with degraded as well as high quality images. Recruiting employees with high levels of skill in these areas, and allocating them to relevant tasks, is an efficient way to overcome some of the known difficulties associated with unfamiliar face recognition.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84960357027&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0150036
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0150036
M3 - Article
C2 - 26918457
AN - SCOPUS:84960357027
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 11
JO - PLoS One
JF - PLoS One
IS - 2
M1 - e0150036
ER -