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By Agence France-Presse
From family and friends to strangers in the subway, to public figures broadcasting 24 hours a day, humans recognize an impressive 5,000 faces, scientists said at a first study of its kind.
(PIXABAY / MANILA BULLETIN)
During most of history, humans have lived in small groups of about one hundred individuals, a pattern that has changed dramatically in recent centuries.
A study by scientists from the UK University of York found that our facial recognition capabilities allowed us to deal with thousands of faces every day in high-demand social environments, on our smartphones and television screens.
"In everyday life, we have the habit of identifying friends, colleagues and celebrities, as well as many other people," said Rob Jenkins, of the York Psychology Department, at AFP.
"But no one has yet established the number of faces that people actually know."
For the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Jenkins and his team asked participants to write as many faces as they remembered their personal lives.
The volunteers were then invited to do the same with people they recognized but did not know personally.
They were also shown thousands of images of famous people – two photos of each for reasons of consistency – and asked what were the ones they had recognized.
The team discovered a considerable number of faces that each participant could remember, from about 1,000 to 10,000.
"We found that people know about 5,000 faces on average," Jenkins said.
"It seems that any mental device that allows us to differentiate dozens of people also allows us to differentiate thousands of people."
Never forget a face
The team said it believed that this figure – the very first base of human "facial vocabulary" – could help the development of facial recognition software increasingly used in airports and criminal investigations.
It could also help scientists better understand misidentification cases.
"Psychological research in humans has revealed significant differences between unknown and familiar face recognition," said Jenkins.
"Unknown faces are often poorly identified. Familiar faces are identified very reliably, but we do not know exactly how. "
Although the team stated that it focused on the number of faces that humans actually experience, it also stated that it might be possible for some people to continue to learn to recognize an unlimited number of faces, with enough practice.
They pointed out that the brain has an almost unlimited ability to memorize words and languages - the limits of these derive more from time of study and motivation.
The range of faces recognized by the participants went far beyond what could have been useful from the point of view of evolution: for thousands of years, human beings have not been able to do anything. would probably have met only a few dozen people during their lifetime.
Jenkins explained that the reason we had developed the ability to distinguish thousands of faces in the crowd was unclear.
"This could be another case of" overwork "that we sometimes see in nature," he said.
"The venom of some spiders can kill a horse, even if the spider does not need to eat a horse."
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