I’m not sure if this has any practical use for Names & Faces, but it’s interesting:
Why Do Some People Never Forget a Face?
"Face recognition is an important social skill, but not all of us are equally good at it," says Beijing Normal University cognitive psychologist Jia Liu. But what accounts for the difference? A new study by Liu and colleagues Ruosi Wang, Jingguang Li, Huizhen Fang, and Moqian Tian provides the first experimental evidence that the inequality of abilities is rooted in the unique way in which the mind perceives faces. "Individuals who process faces more holistically" -- that is, as an integrated whole -- "are better at face recognition," says Liu.…The results: Those participants who scored higher on CFE and WPE – that is, who did well in holistic processing – also performed better at the first task of recognizing faces.