Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/11/30/are-you-a-super-recognizer-take-this-test.html
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Just barely squeaked into top 25% with a 65%. The recognition task felt easier than the sorting task, though my scores at the end were pretty similar on both sections.
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72%, so top 5% of testers. I am Sherlock Holmes. 
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my overall score was 68%, with 28/40 on face memory, and 54/80 on sorting
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I’m an anti-recognizer
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The London Police use super recognizers. Here is a good article from the New Yorker about it. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/22/londons-super-recognizer-police-force
I saw some of them interviewed a few years ago at the New Yorker Festival - good stories about being out with friends and then seeing an old skip and running after them.
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I gave up b/c typing ‘y’ and ‘n’ during phase 2 called up the page search function (Here’s an ‘n’ on the page!) instead of giving the program my responses.
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This was my first thought when I saw this article originally- “I bet this is a test to find and recruit these super-recognisers- either to train an AI, or to ‘assist’ the security services.”
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I didn’t even bother because, while I don’t have a full fledged case of prosopagnosia (inability to recognize faces/face blindness), I’m apparently bad enough qualify as a lab rat for various studies of the disorder. I can recognize people, given enough time and clues, but there was that one time my husband got new glasses and while I knew who he was, there was this little tiny part of my brain that felt confusion for the next day or so.
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Face memory, 18/40. On a yes/no. Statistically speaking, you’d listen to me and do the opposite.
Prosopagnosia & general neurodiversity wasn’t in the exclusion criteria, so I submitted data.
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Wait, no. On a binary you wouldn’t be surprised within sqrt(20) ~ 4 of the mean. Easy enough to say I did as well as a coin.
I can recognize people just fine i suppose but i didn’t try the test. i just have a terrible attention span and i’m even worse when it comes to memorizing things like names and important dates. I’m always amazed when people i know have a knack for having really great recall when it comes to people
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I have a hard time when seeing people out of context, e.g. seeing someone I’ve worked with at the grocery store. That said, I got a 59%.
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I doubt that the actual experiment is centered around how accurate people are at getting the faces right. I’d guess that it probably is doing some measure of how the digital manipulation effects things but also it seems like there are some priming effects going on in the second task.
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I am definitely not Sherlock.
If they’d put a mirror up on the screen, I’d still have fucked it up.
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I was surprised at how low resolution the “comparison” pictures were - I suppose that’s the point! I found myself trying to memorize distinctive moles, eyebrows, etc, only to find that completely irrelevant when faced with a blown-up low-res image.
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“Your overall score on the UNSW Face Test was 74%.”
I know I recognize faces well, but I still have trouble with the names of people I’ve worked with for a decade.
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Alright so i went ahead and did the test and scored:
On the UNSW Face Memory Test you scored 29 out of 40.
On the UNSW Face Sorting Test you scored 46 out of 80.
Your overall score on the UNSW Face Test was 63%.
Though to be honest i kind of lost patience about halfway. Still i scored better than i thought i would, but names are still my kryptonite and i’m uniquely bad at meeting people for the first time and remembering them.
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My overall score was 72%. I also have the same problem with remembering names. Go figure.
Strangely enough, I once recognized someone from behind from something like 200 feet away. Different hair color and length, and even on different school campuses (met her from a community college and then saw her at the local university). I felt so certain it was her, I hurried up just so I could make sure. It had to do with the way she moved, I guess. Or just crazy intuition?
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You would ace the ass-recognition test.
nearly forgot the smiley
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