Abstract
Over the past decade, the domain of face identity processing has seen a surging interest in inter-individual differences, alongside a focus on individuals with superior skills — so called Super Recognizers (SRs; Russell et al., 2009; Ramon et al., 2019). Despite increasing research and interest, and similarly to the field of developmental prosopagnosia, a consensus on diagnostic criteria for SR identification is lacking. Consequently, SRs are currently identified either inconsistently - via undocumented collections of tests, or single (oftentimes suboptimal) tests. This state of the field has two major implications. Firstly, our scientific understanding of SRs will remain at best limited due to inclusion of false-positive “SR” cases. Secondly, the needs of international security agencies interested in deploying SRs for real-life identity verification are unlikely to be met.
To counteract these issues I have proposed a novel formal diagnostic framework for reliable SR identification (Ramon, 2021). This is also being used to screen the Berlin State Police’s >18K employees prior to SR identification via bespoke applied testing procedures (Ramon & Rjosk, in press). I will offer an overview of open questions concerning SRs and recent findings from my lab, as well as an outlook into future work. The aim is to provide in-depth descriptions of SR individuals over time using complementary methods to generate insights into brain-behavior relationships and advance our understanding of neural functioning.