How Many Faces Do People Know?

Overview

Journal Proc Biol Sci

Specialty Biology

Date 2018 Oct 12

PMID 30305434

Citations 22

Authors

R Jenkins

A J Dowsett

A M Burton

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Over our species history, humans have typically lived in small groups of under a hundred individuals. However, our face recognition abilities appear to equip us to recognize very many individuals, perhaps thousands. Modern society provides access to huge numbers of faces, but no one has established how many faces people actually know. Here, we describe a method for estimating this number. By combining separate measures of recall and recognition, we show that people know about 5000 faces on average and that individual differences are large. Our findings offer a possible explanation for large variation in identification performance. They also provide constraints on understanding the qualitative differences between perception of familiar and unfamiliar faces-a distinction that underlies all current theories of face recognition.

Citing Articles

The role of expansion and adaptability of face-space for individual differences in face identity processing.

Ficco L, Ramon M, Schroeger A, Kaufmann J, Schweinberger S R Soc Open Sci. 2025; 12(1):240879.

PMID: 39845713 PMC: 11750384. DOI: 10.1098/rsos.240879.

Investigating the neural effects of typicality and predictability for face and object stimuli.

Ficco L, Li C, Kaufmann J, Schweinberger S, Kovacs G PLoS One. 2024; 19(5):e0293781.

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Autistic Individuals Do Not Alter Visual Processing Strategy During Encoding Versus Recognition of Faces: A Hidden Markov Modeling Approach.

Griffin J, Webb S, Keehn B, Dawson G, McPartland J J Autism Dev Disord. 2024; .

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Extensive Visual Training in Adulthood Reduces an Implicit Neural Marker of the Face Inversion Effect.

Hagen S, Laguesse R, Rossion B Brain Sci. 2024; 14(2).

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Learning to draw parametric faces.

Davidenko N, Day J Mem Cognit. 2023; 53(1):352-362.

PMID: 38017343 DOI: 10.3758/s13421-023-01498-0.

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