What question did this study set out to answer?

To investigate the consistency of face recognition ability in super-recognizers compared to control observers.

February 28, 2026Open Access

Image or identity? Only Super-Recognizers’ (memor)ability is consistently viewpoint-invariant

JNJeffrey NadorBern University of Applied Sciences TATamara A. Alsheimer AGAyla GayUniversity of Fribourg

Key Points

To investigate the consistency of face recognition ability in super-recognizers compared to control observers.
Conducted two experiments assessing face recognition under different encoding conditions.
Experiment 1 involved implicitly encoded images, and Experiment 2 focused on explicitly encoded identities.
Used 'With or Without You' resampling analysis to evaluate recognition consistency across groups.
In Experiment 1, both groups recognized images at comparable accuracy when faces were encoded implicitly.
In Experiment 2, super-recognizers showed superior performance in recognizing identities despite viewpoint changes.
Super-recognizers demonstrated consistent performance related to memorability across both experiments.

Abstract

A face's memorability refers to the unique combination of visual features facilitating its recognition. Despite considerable variation in face recognition ability amongst the general population, individuals show substantial concordance regarding faces' memorability. This agreement persists, though reduced, when the viewpoints across which identities are seen at encoding and recognition differ. Consequently, individuals must extract some invariant facial information during recognition, robust to changes in viewpoint, to do so consistently (i.e. as a function of stimulus memorability). However, the extent of such consistency remains unclear. Therefore, in two experiments we tested recognition of (i) implicitly encoded face images and (ii) explicitly encoded identities in a group of control observers against a group of "Super-Recognizers" (SRs) possessing exceptional face processing skills (Ramon, 2021). Novel "With or Without You" (WoWY) resampling analyses assessed the consistency of SRs relative to control observers, simultaneously providing measures of intraindividual consistency. When implicit encoding was surreptitiously solicited (Experiment 1), recognition of studied images was comparable between groups. Yet, when encoding was explicitly solicited (Experiment 2), SRs more accurately recognized identities across viewpoint changes than controls. Critically, image-dependent information could only inform recognition in the first experiment, whereas viewpoint-invariant information could inform recognition equally in both. Individual observers' performance profiles reveal that only SRs memorability-related performance was consistent between experiments. Overall, SRs' unique capacity for recognizing faces based on viewpoint-invariant information is rooted in fundamentally more robust representations of identity. These results invite a reinterpretation of face memorability describing viewpoint-invariant information, diagnostic of facial identity representations in memory.

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