There's a lot you can do with a photograph: you can recognise the faces in it; plot it against the location it was taken and its time.
They found, however, that while none of their prosopagnosiac subjects could recognise the faces in the series well, they could distinguish between the other repeated pictures as easily as people without prosopagnosia could.
They asked volunteers to perform a 'Go/ no go' task, using photographs of faces as cues, and then tested their ability to recognise the faces used in the experiment.
So I recognise the faces coming through the front gate from a huge number of backgrounds: Bengali, Somali, Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Latvian, Lithuanian, European, Algerian, Nigerian, Afro-Caribbean.
She says she recognised the faces of the men who held her captive.
After taking a picture, the phone will try to recognise the faces of your friends and family, and offer to email the image to them with just one click.
I have never really spoken to any of my neighbours, and I couldn't tell you any of their names, but I recognise the faces.
Psychologists theorise that pareidolia once helped early humans recognise the faces of predators in the darkness of the jungle, but nowadays it mostly just helps us see weird shit that isn't there.
It's an approach that's proven remarkably effective, and has the potential to transform many of the algorithms that power our day-to-day experiences on the net, from a search engine that can understand the web pages it crawls, to a photo-sharing site that can recognise the faces of your friends in the photos you upload, to a street-view service that can read the numbers on people's front doors.
The tests were designed to spot what are called "super recognisers", individuals who can recognise the face of a person they have barely looked at, and those who might be suffering from a rare condition called prosopagnosia, or face-blindness.
