Recognizing Faces...

Most humans have an amazing ability to recognize faces – more specifically, the ability to see a face – even at a distance – and be able to identify the person who owns that face by name.

I have part of that ability – the faces that I know, I can recognize from a very low resolution image (as in from a distance, or from a photo where the face is just a bit bigger than a dot).  Compared with most people, though, I only recognize a few faces.  I've seen studies that documented the average person's repertoire of recognized faces at well over 1,000.

I suspect my ability is well under 100, and those are the 100 faces I've seen most recently.  My ability to recognize faces seems to be tied to two things: how recently I've seen someone, and how many times I've seen them altogether.  If I meet someone for the first time, spend a few hours with them, and then don't see them again for a year – then I'm not likely to recognize them at all when I see them.  Basically, I have to re-learn who they are.  Because my ability is quite a bit below average, I quite often have the embarrasing experience of someone recognizing me when I haven't the faintest idea who they are.

From studies I've read in the past, I know that people are highly variable in this skill – there are plenty of people with much less facial recognition ability than mine, and there are people whose ability far exceeds the average.  I've worked with a few of these people over the years.  It's a trait I associate with salespeople, where I suspect it's a very valuable skill to possess.

I recall an incident that happened roughly 15 years ago, when I visited a Hewlett-Packard facility in Bristol, England.  I was traveling with a fellow employee (this was when I worked for Stac Electronics) by the name of Jerry who had himself been to this HP facility just once before, about 2 years prior to our current visit, for just a couple hours.  When we entered the HP building, we walked through a sea of cubicles to get to our meeting room.  All along the way, Jerry greeted people by name, often with some evidence that he knew not only their name, but their role and perhaps even something about their family.  With most of these folks, you could see that they didn't recognize him until he mentioned that he was from Stac.  Altogether he greeted something like 30 or 35 people in this fashion – people whom he had met only once before, 2 years ago.  To me, this was an astonishing feat.  I'd have trouble doing that with 35 people I worked with every day; Jerry did it effortlessly.

Anyway, this morning I read about a related study.  This one shows that the ability to recognize faces is heritable, and that it is inherited separately from what we normally think of as IQ.  This has long been suspected, but not convincingly proven until now.