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The next time an old friend meets you with a quizzical air, you're absolutely right to be offended: new research suggests that an average person can recognize 5,000 different faces.
The York University psychologists undertook the study after realizing that despite all the work done by the scientists on the faces, they had never determined, even approximately, the number of known faces of the average man. They say that's the first factual estimate of this figure.
Through a series of volunteer recall and recognition tests, researchers found that the human ability to recognize faces varied tremendously. The study found that people know between 1,000 and 10,000 faces of friends, family members, colleagues and celebrities, most of them counting around 5,000 people.
"We were quite surprised at the high-end," said Mike Burton, a professor of psychology, who led the research at the University of York. About 2% of the population would suffer from "blindness" or prosopagnosia.
"We've been studying faces for years and years, and we're always seeing a huge difference between our ability to recognize known faces and those that are not. People are surprisingly bad at checking a real face with an ID photo, yet we recognize friends and colleagues under extremely varied conditions, "Burton said.
"The brain does something different with familiar and unfamiliar faces, which has been at the heart of our science for a long time. But we realized that we were missing something if we did not know how many familiar faces are recognized by people. "
The scientists asked volunteers to spend an hour recalling as many faces as they could from their private lives, covering former classmates, co-workers, former partners and colleagues. They then went on to famous faces: actors, musicians, sports stars, politicians, etc. By recording the slowdown in volunteer recall rates, psychologists have estimated when they will run out of faces.
In the next part of the study, thousands of photographs of famous people were shown to volunteers and their numbers were tested, even if they could not name the person. Scientists counted an individual as recognized only if the volunteer knew him from two different images.
The researchers reached a figure of 5,000 by combining the results of the two parts of the study. Although the number may seem high, since humans have evolved into small groups, it may simply reflect the social importance of recognizing friends and foes, as well as the large number of faces to which we are now exposed. The details of the work are published in the Acts of the Royal Society B.
"Given the social lives of our ancestors, the ability to recognize thousands of people may seem exaggerated," said Rob Jenkins, a psychologist at the University of York and co-author of the study. "But there are many examples of overwork in nature. The venom of some spiders can kill a horse, even if the spider probably has no ambition to eat it.
Burton said the research could ultimately improve automatic face recognition technology. Today's best systems know how to spot "strangers" but can not surpass humans when it comes to recognizing the people they know. "If we want to do the next step, we will have to start copying that," Burton said.
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