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Case study: Facing facts
How BU research is helping combat terrorism and international crime.
Groundbreaking research from Bournemouth University’s Centre for Face Processing Disorders (CFPD) has discovered that 2% of the population have enhanced facial recognition abilities. These so-called ‘super-recognisers’ have superior skills in both distinguishing between faces and also recognising those that they may not have seen in decades, even those they have only fleetingly encountered.
Professor Sarah Bate and her team began studying super-recognisers following years of working with people with prosopagnosia or ‘face blindness’. They began research in this area to try to understand whether prosopagnosia was a developmental disorder or a sliding scale of ability.
Super-recognisers
“The idea was that if we have people who are at the bottom end of a normal range when it comes to facial recognition, then there must be people who are at the top range too,”
Professor Bate explains.
“The identification of super-recognisers offers an alternative way in which we can improve national security using human resources. If we can also identify the processing strategies used by super-recognisers it is possible we can teach these techniques to people with typical face recognition skills.”
Several police forces are already working with the team to screen their officers for super recognition. This is far from a straightforward process, as Professor Bate’s research shows that different people are better at different aspects of facial recognition. The screening process isn’t just about identifying the best people; it’s about identifying the best people for the task in hand. This is why it is particularly important for the team to have rigorous research to back their theories.
Practical implications
The research has practical implications for national and international security. One of the team’s tests mimicked the challenges faced by border control officials and showed super-recognisers outperformed control participants by up to 18%.
“We have seen many examples where terrorists and criminals have been able to freely move between borders without being spotted,” says Professor Bate. “Our research means we could see people with identified super recognition skills deployed at borders known to be at risk of terrorist or criminal movement.”