Are You Good at Recognizing Faces?

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The Region Of Face Recognition

Like an essential app on our smartphones, face recognition has been an important, often crucial ability for our ancestors, with the eyes playing a big role.
Evolution or nature has placed a special significance on facial recognition for most of us, with a dedicated region of the brain known as fusiform face area used only for computing the faces, mainly through the eyes.
People who are face blind tend to have social anxiety and avoid the eye region of people while looking at them.

Remembering Faces

Forgetting the face of someone we have met once seems normal compared to being able to remember the face of someone after years.

A Super-Recognizer is a person with a gift of remembering a face for a long time, often infinitely. These kinds of people were discovered in 2009, and make up about 2 percent of the population.
On the other end of the spectrum are the prosopagnosics (people with face blindness) who cannot recognize even familiar faces like their own face.

The Hidden Superpower: Face Recognition

Many people may not be super-recognizers but just have a better memory, according to many tests.

The superpower that facial super-recognizers have is to immediately place an actor they see on a TV series to some older sitcom/movie/series that the same actor may have appeared, even if that was a long time ago or was in a completely different makeup/costume.

Recognizing Faces: Genetic Ability And Extroversion

The super-recognizers seem to have a genetic component according to research on identical and fraternal twins, making this ability bend towards heritability.
Extroverts seem to have a higher facial recognition ability, and people with less social interaction have poor facial recognition skills, suggesting that it is akin to a muscle that gets better with usage.