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Remember Faces shows you a set of faces and later asks whether a face was among them. Face memory is a specialised ability — it correlates only weakly with memory for other things, and the range between people is unusually wide, from prosopagnosia at one end to super-recognisers at the other.
Study a set of faces.
A delay follows.
Faces are shown one at a time.
Say whether each one was in the original set.
Your score reflects hits against false alarms.
Face recognition memory. It is genuinely distinct from general memory, which is why someone with an excellent memory for facts can still be poor with faces.
Look for one distinctive feature per face and name it. A verbal tag survives the delay far better than an impression.
Focus on the eye region. It carries the most identifying information and is least affected by expression.
Ignore hair and clothing. They change and they are not part of the face.
Trust familiarity. If a face feels familiar you are usually right, even without knowing why.
Face recognition ability varies enormously and is substantially heritable. Being poor at it says nothing about your memory generally.
A person at the top end of face recognition ability, capable of identifying faces seen once years earlier. They are rare and some police forces recruit specifically for it.
Difficulty recognising faces, sometimes severe enough that people cannot recognise family members. It can be congenital or acquired.
Deliberate feature-naming helps most people somewhat. The underlying ability is fairly stable.