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How many faces do people know?

R Jenkins1, A J Dowsett2, A M Burton3

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of York, York YO10 5DD, UK rob.jenkins@york.ac.uk.

Proceedings. Biological Sciences
|October 12, 2018
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Humans can recognize thousands of faces, far more than small ancestral groups. This study estimates the average person knows around 5000 faces, explaining variations in facial recognition abilities.

Keywords:
face recognitionmemorymental representationsocial group size

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Neuroscience
  • Human Evolution

Background:

  • Human social structures historically involved small groups (under 100 individuals).
  • Facial recognition capabilities suggest a capacity for recognizing many more individuals than previously assumed.
  • The exact number of familiar faces recognized by humans remains unquantified.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To develop and apply a novel method for estimating the number of faces individuals know.
  • To quantify the average number of familiar faces recognized by humans.
  • To investigate the large individual differences in facial recognition capacity.

Main Methods:

  • Combined separate measures of facial recall and recognition.
  • Developed a novel estimation technique for quantifying known faces.
  • Analyzed individual differences in face identification performance.

Main Results:

  • The average person knows approximately 5000 faces.
  • Significant and large individual variations exist in the number of recognized faces.
  • The study provides insights into performance variations in facial identification.

Conclusions:

  • Human face recognition capacity significantly exceeds historical group sizes.
  • The findings offer a potential explanation for performance variability in facial identification.
  • This research provides crucial data for understanding the perception of familiar versus unfamiliar faces, impacting face recognition theories.