5 ms·

I've often wondered: are human faces more variable than most species, or are human brains evolved to be particularly sensitive to those variations?

• antiterra 14y ago
  Human brains have definitely evolved to allow face recognition and distinction from infancy. There are people with "face blindness," prosopagnosia and they have difficulty distinguishing characteristics of their own face. I have heard someone with face blindness describe distinguishing between two faces similar to distinguishing between two similar river rocks. Interestingly, and perhaps as clue to your first suggestion, experimentation implies crows can recognize and remember human faces over long durations of time. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347209005806 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347209...
• olalonde 14y ago
  Not only evolved but also trained I believe. From my experience, Chinese people have a harder time distinguishing faces of foreigners and vice versa.
  • wahnfrieden 14y ago
    Yes, different races vary more distinctly on different facial features.
  • miahi 14y ago
    It's a trained pattern recognition. When you see a face from your race, you already saw many others like it, so to distinguish people you trained to see the details. You see a face from another race you are not accustomed to, your pattern matcher says "hey, it's that _race_" and then it stops, as it doesn't know to distinguish details for that race. An interesting study about this[1] shows that children exposed to other races (adopted and moved to another region) lose their initial training. [1] http://www.pallier.org/papers/SangrigoliPallier_finaldraft.pdf http://www.pallier.org/papers/SangrigoliPallier_finaldraft.p...