4 ms·
Simple explanation: we don't know how to distinguish between faces "out of the box", we have to be trained to do it. Most of our training happens within our own
by hasenj 16y ago
Simple explanation: we don't know how to distinguish between faces "out of the box", we have to be trained to do it. Most of our training happens within our own race, so we become very good at distinguishing faces.
When presented with completely different type of faces, we have to work hard to tell two faces apart, we can't just distinguish them on first sight.
It's like knowing to tell the alphabet from your own language vs some other language you're encountering for the first time.
- pygy_ 16y agoWe have specialized circuitry to process faces. People are congenitally deficient in this regard suffer from prosopagnosia (in the same way that some people with normal hearing are tone deaf). That said, you're not completely off track. It is very likely that said circuitry becomes better at disinguishing the kind of faces it has been initially trained with. A nice complement for this study would be to test mixed race and adopted people.
- lukeschlather 16y agoI don't have any studies on hand, but I specifically remember a lecture I attended where it was noted that infants do not have specialized circuitry to process faces. Their affinity for their caretakers, at least at a very early age, is actually not a result of recognizing people, but of the caretakers subconsciously learning how to better provoke an affectionate response. You also saw this effect with the emotional robot Kismet at MIT. Its reactions were totally hardwired, but it managed to fool people into believing that it "liked" them.