New research shows that there’s a broad range of face-recognition ability, a spectrum ranging from the “face blind” to those on the opposite end with superior powers of perception.

“Super-recognizers actually see faces differently,” says Dr. Richard Russell, a researcher in the Harvard Vision Sciences Laboratory and lead author of the new study published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. “They can recognize people out of context, people who aren’t important to them, people who they may have met only briefly.”

Russell and his colleagues were investigating developmental prosopagnosia, a condition in which people have normal vision but are unable to recognize faces, even those of close relatives — an estimated 2 percent of the general population has exceptionally poor face-recognition ability.

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