Read two texts about human memory. For questions 1–3, choose the answer that best matches the text and circle the appropriate letter (A, B, C or D).

SUPER RECOGNIZERS

On a hot August afternoon in 2011, as rioters looted and cars burned in the streets, a group of police officers were gathered in a room in London. Projected on the wall was the blurry shape of a man with a black woolen hat pulled deep over his forehead and a red bandana covering all but his eyes. Security cameras had tracked the man setting fire to cars, stealing from shops and attacking passers-by. At that moment, Constable Gary Collins walked in. He took one look and said, “That’s Stephen Prince.” The last time he had come face to face with Stephen Prince was in 2005. It was just a fleeting encounter in court, but it was enough. Over a two-week time span prior to the meeting, Collins had identified 180 suspects out of 4000 captured by security cameras in the London riots. Meanwhile, other officers who had applied profile and facial recognition software had managed to identify just one suspect.

With its estimated one million security cameras, London is pioneering a new area of detection, one that could be cheaper than DNA analysis and fingerprinting and relies above all on human superpowers. Scotland Yard’s ever-expanding team of super recognizers is made up of men and women from across the force who score at the top end of a facial recognition test originally devised at Harvard in 2009. Constable Collins, the star of the unit, is in the rarefied top 1 percent range. The term ‘super recognizers’ was coined in 2009 by Richard Russell, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard, whose work inspired the police authorities to make use of super recognizers’ skills. Russell was studying people with prosopagnosia, that is face blindness. He found that about 2 percent of people had a very poor ability to recognize faces. Then he grew curious if there were people at the other end of the spectrum, with extraordinary facial recall. Russell tested four individuals who believed they had superior face-recognition ability. The tasks included the Face Memory Test and a quiz in which participants have to identify celebrities from photographs taken mostly when they were children. All four participants scored far better than the norm. When Russell did larger-scale experiments, he concluded that 1 or 2 percent of people were super recognizers.

Constable Collins, an unassuming man with cropped graying hair and a soft Cockney lilt, patrols the same streets in North London he grew up in. He has become famous among colleagues and villains alike. One of his colleagues likens his mind to a rotating file, “You show him a photo, 30 seconds later the name pops up. And he’s always on the mark.” It turns out, however, that super recognizers’ ability to remember silhouettes and faces is rarely matched by the ability to remember other details of their lives. It is unbelievable that Constable Collins, who has identified over 800 suspects, is incapable of remembering a shopping list.

Possessing such a skill is not without its pitfalls. When off duty, Constable Collins tends to stare at people a bit too long. Once he was almost punched by a teenager. “Some think I’m being provocative, but I can’t help it,” he said. He deliberately moved out of London to avoid running into wanted faces from his beat. But this is not a foolproof solution. Recently, he had to cut short an outing to the mall with his sons when he recognized a gaggle of gang members while buying sneakers. He reckons that his oldest son, 11 years old and soccer-obsessed, is also able to recognize faces. “He knows football players in countries and teams I haven’t even heard of and immediately gives the names once they appear on TV. Who knows, one day he might become a super recognizer as well.”

adapted from http://nymag.com