What can spiders, portrait artists and Game of Thrones tell us about human visual cognition?

Over the years, my interest has been in understanding how people’s specific visual or emotional experience shapes the way they view and attend to the world; and in what this can teach us about visual cognition. I will briefly outline the results of my work on self-recognition, visual attention and portrait artists. Then I’ll focus on a recent study examining individual differences in real-world person recognition abilities. I exploited the series Game of Thrones, which introduced numerous unknown actors over 6 years, in order to challenge people’s recognition and memory abilities and to determine the limits of people with superior recognition skills. The study shows that individual differences in person recognition involve a variety of cognitive skills and that superior recognisers are not immune to errors. Results highlight a need for new methods for studying person recognition in the general population; and for assessment tools used in clinical and forensics contexts.