THE CONVERSATION: Introvert? You may just be bad at recognising faces

Description

Although most of us can distinguish between and remember hundreds of different faces, some people are better at it than others. “Super-recognisers” can accurately identify faces even when they have only seen them briefly previously. At the other extreme, “developmental prosopagnosics” are significantly impaired at recognising faces in many everyday situations.

For the majority of us though, our face recognition ability falls between these extremes. But why are there such huge individual differences? How do these abilities affect us and where do they come from? Psychologists have started to investigate such questions, and found several answers. For example, we have discovered that it is linked to personality.