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This method of face recognition stands in contrast to what some neuroscientists previously thought about how humans recognize faces. Previously, there were two opposing theories: “exemplar ...
May 28, 2023 · Humans have an uncanny ability to recognize faces. Decades of research on the topic have revealed how good we are at recognizing faces across changes in viewpoint, expression, even age.
Mar 8, 2024 · Humans suffer from a well-documented phenomenon called the “other race” effect: We are worse at recognizing the faces of ethnic groups that are less familiar to us. This is true even of super ...
- Introduction
- Brain Differences
- Cognitive Processing
- Personality and Social Interaction
- Can Face-Recognition Ability Change?
- Conclusion
- Conflict of Interest
- Acknowledgments
- Footnotes
Most of us can recognise the people around us, our friends, family, and teachers. By the time we are adults, most of us can accurately recognise hundreds of different people. This ability is shaped by our social environment. For example, people generally find it easier to recognise faces from the same racial and age groups as themselves. Why is fac...
Brain differences between individuals are one possible reason for differences in the ability to recognise faces. Maybe people who are good at recognising faces have brains that are bigger, more connected, or somehow working better than the brains of people who are not so good at recognising faces? Several brain areas important for face recognition ...
A second possible reason for individual differences in face recognition is that this ability is related to factors like intelligence or memory—these are both types of cognitive processingThe mental processes (things that go on in our heads) that are involved in gaining knowledge and understanding things. These include perception, encoding, and memo...
It is also possible that how good people are at recognising faces is linked to their personalities or levels of social interaction. Perhaps people who are more interested in meeting and talking with other people are more practised at recognising faces and are better at recognising them. Alternatively, people who are not good at recognising faces ma...
Can the ability to recognise faces change with time? Are there things we can do to get better at recognising faces? It is thought that the ability to accurately recognise faces improves with age, starting at about 5 years old until adulthood, with a dip possible during early adolescence. There is also a decrease in face-recognition ability from abo...
We are surrounded by people, and recognising their faces allows us to form friendships, interact appropriately, and work or play together. However, we are not all equally good at recognising faces. Individual differences in the ability to recognise faces might be related to differences in our brains, for example, how much some brain areas are activ...
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Many thanks to our reviewers and also to 17-year-old reviewer Angelina. Your comments were very useful in developing the article.
1. ↑If you want to learn more about super-recognisers and see if you are one, check out https://www.superrecognisers.com/ 2. ↑If you want to find out about the function and location of the fusiform face area (FFA) then please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusiform_face_area
His PhD was on the Forensic Identification of Unfamiliar Faces in CCTV Images (2007) and he has since published over 30 articles on human face recognition and eyewitness identification, the reliability of facial composite systems (e.g., E-FIT, EFIT-V), methods used by expert witnesses to provide evidence of identification in court (“facial comparison evidence”), and juror decision making ...
Aug 13, 2020 · With the discovery of super-recognizers in 2009 came a new way of thinking about face perception: The ability to recognize faces seems to exist on a spectrum, with the 2 percent of the population who are super-recognizers on one end, and prosopagnosiacs — that is, the 2 percent who are unable to recognize familiar faces (including their own) — at the other.
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May 20, 2019 · It happens to all of us: someone recognizes you on the street, calls you by name, and says hello. You, meanwhile, have no idea who that person is. Researchers say this struggle to read other faces ...
