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Meike Ramon, Applied Face Cognition Lab

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 — socalled Super-Recognizers (SRs; Russell et al., 2009; Ramon et al., 2019). Their study can provide valuable insights into brain-behavior relationships and advance our understanding of neural functioning. 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. In this talk I will discuss three aspects related to fundamental and applied research on human face cognition and SRs:

• A recently proposed novel formal diagnostic framework for reliable SR identification in
the lab (Ramon, 2021);

• Generalizability of lab-based procedures for applied security relevant settings;

• A bespoke assessment tool developed to identify SRs via professionally relevant
procedures and authentic police material among the 25K employees of the Berlin
State Police.