CNH Roundtable Talk by Dr Genevieve Quek

Talk Title: Tracing Individual Differences in Incidental Face Recognition: Implicit Behavioural and Neural Indices of Heightened Face Identity Processing

Talk Abstract: Face recognition is a fundamental brain function that varies widely across individuals. At the top end, ‘Super-Recognisers’ display an exceptionally strong ability to remember and individuate human faces, often spontaneously recognising people they have only briefly met. Typically studied under a behavioural framework that probes recognition via deliberate tasks (e.g., “remember this face for later”), little is known about individual differences in incidental face recognition, i.e., recognition in the absence of explicit instructions to attend to face identity. In this talk I will present a series of behavioural and neural investigations aimed at deriving implicit indices of face identity processing in both super-recognisers and their typical-recogniser counterparts. We broaden the scope beyond the field’s near-exclusive focus on face identity, examining how individual observers prioritise multiple socially-relevant dimensions of faces – both those that vary within and across identities – and revealing how face recognition ability as captured by standardised tests (e.g., Cambridge Face Memory Test) modulates these weightings. Across these experiments, we find strong evidence that Super-Recognisers exhibit not only superior face memory / matching under explicit task conditions, but also a fundamental tendency to prioritise identity over other face dimensions, even when it interferes with the task at hand. A neural correlate of this prioritisation arises at a post-perceptual stage of processing, reflected in enhanced representation of individual identities ~350ms for Super-recognisers compared to control participants. Intriguingly, we also find novel evidence that under implicit task conditions, the Super-Recogniser advantage may extend to include non-identity related face aspects, including facial expression and ethnicity.