Face processing
Does being good with faces make you good at recognising people?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
People who scored well on a standard face-matching test were mostly not better at matching identities from bodies or from movement, even though group statistics suggested they were.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Single-session correlational test battery: GFMT screening score used to form low/medium/high groups, then related to accuracy on a second face test, a face-hidden body-matching test and a point-light biological-motion test
- N
- N=90 · 90 undergraduates, split by GFMT score into three groups of 30; 14 scored at or above 95% and were treated as 'top performers'
- Population
- Undergraduate students at the University of Texas at Dallas, mostly female, aged 18-34
- Outcome
- Percent correct on same/different identity matching for faces (EFCT), bodies with faces masked, and point-light walking videos
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Key findings
GFMT scores correlated moderately with the other face test (r = .54) but only weakly with body matching (r = .25) and biological-motion matching (r = .23), explaining around 5-6% of the variance for the non-face tasks. Only 20% of the low-GFMT group were low on all three tasks, and only 20% of the high group were high on all three; just 4 of 14 top performers were in the top band on every task. Yet the group ANOVA showed a significant effect of face ability with no interaction, which on its own would suggest the face test predicts all tasks.
Methodology
Ninety students took a short standard face-matching test (the GFMT) plus three identity-matching tasks: a harder face test, a test with photos of people's bodies with the face covered, and a test with point-light videos showing only a person's movement. The researchers first plotted each individual's performance across tasks, then ran correlations, and finally ran the kind of group ANOVA that is common in this literature.
Limitations
The sample was 90 undergraduates tested once on a single day, so the study cannot say whether performance is stable over time or whether results apply to professional examiners or verified super-recognisers, who were not specifically recruited. The biological-motion test had only 20 trials and the body test was custom-made, so their low reliability could partly explain weak correlations. As a correlational study it cannot separate true ability from general motivation, which the authors note can inflate correlations across tasks.
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