How many faces do people know?

R. Jenkins; A. J. Dowsett; A. M. Burton

doi:10.1098/rspb.2018.1319

How many faces do people know?

R. Jenkins^* (Corresponding Author), A. J. Dowsett, A. M. Burton

^*Corresponding author for this work

Psychology

University of York

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

61 Citations (Scopus)

6 Downloads (Pure)

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.

Original language	English
Article number	20181319
Journal	Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Volume	285
Issue number	1888
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2018.1319
Publication status	Published - 10 Oct 2018

Bibliographical note

Funding
This research was supported by the European Research Council (no. 323262).

Acknowledgements
R.J., A.M.B., Helen Long, David White, Allan McNeill, Stuart McDonald, Ailsa Strathie, Heather Cursiter, Clare Sutherland, Laura del Carpio, Antony McCarthy and Jane McLachlan contributed to the list of public figures. Laura del Carpio and Faith Hodgins collected pilot data.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 The Authors.

Data Availability Statement

Data accessibility. Data available from the Dryad Digital Repository:
https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.7f25j43 [35].

Electronic supplementary material is available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.4244918.

Keywords

Face recognition
Memory
Mental representation
Social group size

Access to Document

10.1098/rspb.2018.1319Licence: CC BY

Jenkins_etal_POTRSBBS_How_Many_Faces_VoR
& 2018 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
Final published version, 405 KBLicence: CC BY

Cite this

@article{3a5403527a9d473a9c35211c02c3579a,

title = "How many faces do people know?",

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.",

keywords = "Face recognition, Memory, Mental representation, Social group size",

author = "R. Jenkins and Dowsett, {A. J.} and Burton, {A. M.}",

note = "Funding This research was supported by the European Research Council (no. 323262). Acknowledgements R.J., A.M.B., Helen Long, David White, Allan McNeill, Stuart McDonald, Ailsa Strathie, Heather Cursiter, Clare Sutherland, Laura del Carpio, Antony McCarthy and Jane McLachlan contributed to the list of public figures. Laura del Carpio and Faith Hodgins collected pilot data. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2018 The Authors. ",

year = "2018",

month = oct,

day = "10",

doi = "10.1098/rspb.2018.1319",

language = "English",

volume = "285",

journal = "Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences",

issn = "0962-8452",