How Did You Know You Had an Extraordinary Ability?

Super-recognizers have an extraordinary ability to recognize faces—they can pick faces they’ve seen only briefly out of a crowd and can recognize childhood acquaintances they haven’t seen in decades. Josh Davis, PhD, a professor of applied psychology at the University of Greenwich, and super-recognizer Kelly Desborough discuss the origins of this ability, why you can’t train yourself to be a super-recognizer, how super-recognizers compare with facial-recognition algorithms, and why police departments and security organizations are interested in working with super-recognizers.

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