Awareness of face recognition ability changes across the life span

What is it about?

Awareness of one's face recognition ability is important to social functioning but is a relatively unexamined skill. We characterized face recognition awareness across the lifespan in a large web-based sample. We showed that people generally have good insight into their face recognition ability, particularly from the mid-20s to 40s. We also found that both those under 20 and over 50 tend to overestimate their face recognition ability and that compared with females, males displayed a tendency to overestimate their face recognition ability. We also found that face recognition ability peaks about 10 years later than awareness of this ability, which is temporally aligned with the lifetime peak of other more general metacognitive processes. This suggests that, at least in the case of face recognition, ability and metacognitive awareness of that ability do not share a developmental trajectory.

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Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This is important work in that it is one of the largest studies examining social metacognition and it shows that people generally have good insight into their face recognition abilities. It also demonstrates that face recognition awareness is highest in the early-to-mid 20s, nearly 10 years before face recognition abilities peak. This suggests that insight into a cognitive ability does not necessarily correspond with skill in that ability.

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