From family and friends to strangers on the subway and public figures on 24-hour news cycles, humans recognize an astonishing 5,000 faces, scientists said yesterday in the first study of its kind.
Through most of history humans lived in small groups of a hundred or so individuals, a pattern that has changed drastically in recent centuries.
A study by scientists at Britain’s University of York found that our facial recognition abilities allow us to process the thousands of faces we encounter in busy social environments, on our smartphones and our television screens every day. “In everyday life, we are used to identifying friends, colleagues, and celebrities, and many other people by their faces,” Rob Jenkins, from York’s Department of Psychology, said.
Photo: AFP
“But no one has established how many faces people actually know.”
For the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Jenkins and his team asked participants to write down as many faces they could remember from their personal lives. The volunteers were then asked to do the same with people they recognised but did not know personally.
They were also shown thousands of images of famous people — two photos of each to ensure consistency — and asked which ones they recognized. The team found an enormous range of the number of faces each participant could recall, from roughly 1,000 to 10,000.
“We found that people know around 5,000 faces on average,” Jenkins said.
“It seems that whatever mental apparatus allows us to differentiate dozens of people also allows us to differentiate thousands of people.”
NEVER FORGET A FACE
The team said it believes this figure — the first ever baseline of human “facial vocabulary,” could aid the development of facial recognition software increasingly used at airports and criminal investigations. It may also help scientists better understand cases of mistaken identity.
“Psychological research in humans has revealed important differences between unfamiliar and familiar face recognition,” said Jenkins. “Unfamiliar faces are often misidentified. Familiar faces are identified very reliably, but we don’t know exactly how.”
While the team said it was focused on how many faces humans actually know, they said it might be possible for some people to continue learning to recognize an unlimited number of faces, given enough practice. They pointed out that the brain has an almost limitless capacity to memorize words and languages — the limits on these instead come from study time and motivation.
The range of faces recognized by participants went far beyond what may have been evolutionarily useful: for thousands of years humans would likely only have met a few dozen people throughout their lives. Jenkins said it was not clear why we developed the ability to distinguish between thousands of faces in the crowd.
“This could be another case of ‘overkill’ that is sometimes seen in nature,” he said.
“The venom of some spiders can kill a horse, even though the spider has no need to eat a horse.”
In 2020, a labor attache from the Philippines in Taipei sent a letter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanding that a Filipina worker accused of “cyber-libel” against then-president Rodrigo Duterte be deported. A press release from the Philippines office from the attache accused the woman of “using several social media accounts” to “discredit and malign the President and destabilize the government.” The attache also claimed that the woman had broken Taiwan’s laws. The government responded that she had broken no laws, and that all foreign workers were treated the same as Taiwan citizens and that “their rights are protected,
March 16 to March 22 In just a year, Liu Ching-hsiang (劉清香) went from Taiwanese opera performer to arguably Taiwan’s first pop superstar, pumping out hits that captivated the Japanese colony under the moniker Chun-chun (純純). Last week’s Taiwan in Time explored how the Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) theme song for the Chinese silent movie The Peach Girl (桃花泣血記) unexpectedly became the first smash hit after the film’s Taipei premiere in March 1932, in part due to aggressive promotion on the streets. Seeing an opportunity, Columbia Records’ (affiliated with the US entity) Taiwan director Shojiro Kashino asked Liu, who had
The recent decline in average room rates is undoubtedly bad news for Taiwan’s hoteliers and homestay operators, but this downturn shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. According to statistics published by the Tourism Administration (TA) on March 3, the average cost of a one-night stay in a hotel last year was NT$2,960, down 1.17 percent compared to 2023. (At more than three quarters of Taiwan’s hotels, the average room rate is even lower, because high-end properties charging NT$10,000-plus skew the data.) Homestay guests paid an average of NT$2,405, a 4.15-percent drop year on year. The countrywide hotel occupancy rate fell from
In late December 1959, Taiwan dispatched a technical mission to the Republic of Vietnam. Comprising agriculturalists and fisheries experts, the team represented Taiwan’s foray into official development assistance (ODA), marking its transition from recipient to donor nation. For more than a decade prior — and indeed, far longer during Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) rule on the “mainland” — the Republic of China (ROC) had received ODA from the US, through agencies such as the International Cooperation Administration, a predecessor to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). More than a third of domestic investment came via such sources between 1951
RSS