Recognising Facial Identity Across Age: A Comparison of Super‐Recognisers, People With Developmental Prosopagnosia and Typical Perceivers

Attard, Janice, Dark, Olivia, Murray, Ebony ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4928-5871 and Bate, Sarah (2026) Recognising Facial Identity Across Age: A Comparison of Super‐Recognisers, People With Developmental Prosopagnosia and Typical Perceivers. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 40 (5). e70294. doi:10.1002/acp.70294

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Abstract

Recognising and matching unfamiliar faces across highly variable photographs of the same face is a challenging task, but few studies have examined the ability to group identities together across photographs depicting different biological ages. This study examined the ability to sort the identity of ambient images that depict two target individuals between infancy and young adulthood. Three participant groups were examined: super‐recognisers (SRs), individuals with developmental prosopagnosia (DPs) and controls. SRs significantly outperformed both DPs and controls, making fewer overall errors in clustering the identities. Furthermore, 80% of SRs achieved perfect accuracy, compared with 15% in each of the other two groups. DP performance was highly variable and overall did not differ from controls, with both performing near chance‐level. These findings highlight the heterogeneity of impairment in DPs and the SRs' exceptional tolerance for within‐person variability, even across significant age‐related changes, offering a potential indicator for use in SR screening.

Item Type:	Article
Article Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	age perception; cross-age facial identity recognition; developmental prosopagnosia; face perception; facial identity recognition; super-recognisers
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
Divisions:	Schools and Research Institutes > School of Education, Health and Sciences
Depositing User:	Rhiannon Goodland
Date Deposited:	26 Oct 2026 10:57
Last Modified:	26 Oct 2026 11:15
URI:	https://eprints.glos.ac.uk/id/eprint/16606

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