Psychologists at UNSW Sydney and University of Wollongong have challenged the prevailing view that people with exceptional face recognition abilities rely on processing faces holistically.
Instead, they argue, people who are great at learning and remembering new faces — also known as super recognisers — can divide new faces into parts, before storing them in the brain as composite images.
“It’s been a long-held belief that to remember a face well you need to have a global impression of the face, basically by looking at the centre and seeing the face as a whole,” said lead researcher, Dr James Dunn.
“But our research shows that super-recognisers are still able to recognise faces better than others even when they can only see smaller regions at a time. This suggests that they can piece together an overall impression from smaller chunks, rather than from a holistic impression taken in…
