Vaishnavi Mohite¹, Arun SP²; ¹Indian Institute of Science

People vary widely in their face perception abilities, from those who are face blind (having difficulties with faces) to super recognizers (who are excellent with faces). Precisely which features causes good or bad face perception remains unanswered. We recently set out to characterize the full spectrum of face recognition abilities in the Indian population. To this end, we developed an online mobile-based tool called the Indian Face Memory Test (IFMT), which is based on existing face memory tests like the Cambridge Face Memory Test. The IFMT had three blocks of increasing difficulty. In each block, participants were shown a target faces, and had to identify them amongst 4 other faces. A total of 48 unique front-facing Indian faces were used in all blocks, while ensuring that the target and distractor faces were presented equally often in the experiment, to avoid decisions based on familiarity. We administered the IFMT to 580 adults (age ≥18, 259 males and 315 females and 6 others) well as a subjective face recognition questionnaire (PI-20). Participants showed a wide range of performance in all blocks, with Block 2 being the hardest (accuracy, mean ± sem: 94.4% ± 0.5% in Block 1; 44.1% ± 0.9% in Block 2; 28.8% ± 0.5% in Block 3). Accuracy did not vary significantly with age or gender, nor with subjective face recognition scores. Finally, we tested a subset of 40 participants on the IFMT again after a gap of about 30 days. Participants showed a high correlation in their performance across all blocks (r = 0.47, p = 0.002). T). Thus, the IFMT provides objective and reproducible measurements of face-recognition ability over time. Together, these results demonstrate that the IFMT is a reliable and culturally appropriate tool capable of characterizing the full range of face perception.

Acknowledgements: This research was supported by the DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance Senior Fellowship awarded to SPA (Grant# IA/S/17/1/503081).