On the Record

By: Caryn Tamber

My cognitive psychologist husband passed along this study to me on face-recognition in humans, which could have some implications for the court system.

If you ever took Psych 100 in college, you probably learned about a disorder called prosopagnosia (honey, forgive me for linking to a Wikipedia entry here), or “face-blindness,” whose sufferers have a really hard time recognizing faces, even though they can recognize other things. There’s acquired prosopagnosia, which generally comes from some sort of brain damage, and developmental prosopagnosia, which seems to be inborn. Psychologists have estimated that 2 to 2.5 percent of the population suffers from developmental prosopagnosia.

The study suggests that face-recognition is more of a spectrum than a simple matter of a small percentage of the population with a disorder. The researchers found some “super-recognizers” who scored much higher than normal on face-recognition tasks–about as far from normal in one direction as developmental prosopagnosiacs are in the other. The press release about the study says:

If face recognition abilities do vary, testing for this may be important for assessing eyewitness testimony, or for interviewing for some jobs, such as security or those checking identification.

There have been a ton of court opinions in recent years about the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. What if we could test witnesses before they took the stand to check whether they are prosopagnosiacs, super-recognizers, or somewhere else on the face-recognition spectrum? Would this make eyewitness testimony less objectionable to courts and criminal defense lawyers? What would the implications be for, say, a mugging victim who happens to have bad face-recognition abilities? Could his or her photo-array ID be ruled inadmissible because of a poor score on some face-recognition test?