Although most of us can distinguish between and remember hundreds of different faces , some people are better at it than others.
“Super-recognizers” can accurately identify faces even when they have only seen them briefly previously.
At the other extreme, “developmental prosopagnosics” are significantly impaired at recognizing faces in many everyday situations.
For the majority of us though, our face recognition ability falls between these extremes.
But why are there such huge individual differences?
How do these abilities affect us and where do they come from?
Psychologists have started to investigate such questions and found several answers.
For example, we have discovered that it is linked to personality.
Face recognition differences may reflect processing or structural differences in the brain.
For example, people with prosopagnosia may have reduced connectivity between brain regions in the face processing network.
Another idea is that face recognition ability is related to other more general cognitive abilities, like memory or visual processing. Here, though, findings are mixed.
Some research supports a link between face recognition and specific abilities like visual processing. But other research has discounted this idea.
Yet another possibility is that individual differences in face recognition reflect a person’s personality or their social and emotional functioning.
Interestingly, face recognition ability has been linked to measures of empathy and anxiety.
Empathy reflects a person’s ability to understand and share the feelings of another person.
In 2010, researchers asked volunteers to try and remember the identity of a number of faces presented one at a time.
They were later presented with the same faces mixed together with new faces and were asked to state whether each face was “old” (learned) or “new”.
The performance was measured by the number of learnt faces correctly identified as being familiar. The researchers found that those who rated themselves as high in empathy performed significantly better at a face recognition memory task than those with low empathy skills.
Research has also found that people who report significantly lower levels of general anxiety have better face recognition skills than those who have higher anxiety.
Interestingly, more recent research has suggested the link between anxiety and face recognition ability may be more prominent for women and may be particularly related to anxiety in social situations (social anxiety).
Situational anxiety may also play a role. For example, face recognition may be impaired when an eyewitness is asked to try and identify the face of a suspect viewed in a stressful situation.
Personality
In our own work, we have considered the relationship between extroversion and individual face recognition ability.
Extroverts are known to be superior at decoding social information and to be more involved in social activities than introverts.
It may, therefore, be that extroverts are more skilled at recognizing different identities.
In a previous study, researchers collected data from a group of 20 highly extroverted and 23 highly introverted volunteers (from an original sample of 339 volunteers).
They found that extroverts performed significantly better in a face recognition memory task compared with the introverts.
In our own work, we looked at 100 volunteers with a range of extroversion levels. The volunteers were shown famous faces and were asked to try and identify them by giving their name or some other identifying information.
Volunteers were also asked to say whether two unfamiliar faces belonged to the same person or different people – a task dubbed face matching.
While there was no relationship between extroversion and face matching, there was a positive relationship between extroversion and famous face recognition.
So to answer our own question, although there is individual variation, extroverts do tend to be better at recognizing faces.
We do not yet understand the importance and reason for these findings, however.
It may be that extroversion causes superior face recognition or that people who are better at identifying faces become more extroverted as a result.
If so, then a person’s inability to learn and recognize faces may lead them to become more introverted, to avoid potentially embarrassing social situations.
Alternatively, introverted people may meet fewer people and therefore never develop good face recognition skills.
Face recognition differences may reflect processing or structural differences in the brain. For example, people with prosopagnosia may have reduced connectivity between brain regions in the face processing network. The image is adapted from the University of Manchester news release.
It may also work both ways.
If you are slightly worse at recognising faces to start with you may end up meeting fewer people, and therefore becoming even worse at it over time.
It could also be that both extroversion and face recognition are related to yet another factor that we still don’t know about.
In future work, we need to consider how our findings with extroversion fit together with research on empathy and anxiety. We also need to consider how much practical impact these issues have on face identification in applied situations – from identification by police officers to passport control.
Our own ongoing work is looking at the impact of wider individual factors like altruism and optimism on face recognition.
It may be that we soon find even more explanations for why some of us are just better at recognizing faces than others.
The ability to interact effectively in social environments is essential to success in everyday life.
Because faces are arguably the most important social stimuli, the ability to correctly recognize faces is vital for social interaction.
Individuals with better social skills may spend more time on people, which helps get better at recognizing faces.
Consistent with this hypothesis, a recent behavioral genetic study has demonstrated substantial environmental influence on face recognition along with the genetic factor.1
On the other hand, deficits in face recognition, such as prosopagnosia (i.e., face blindness2,3), may lead individuals to suffer from psychosocial difficulties such as fear and avoidance of social situations.4
However, little effort has been dedicated to directly testing the relation between social activities and face recognition ability. Here, we ask whether individuals with better social skills have better face recognition ability.
Extraversion is chosen as a measure of one’s social skills. As one of the fundamental dimensions of personality, extraversion is often thought of as implying sociability that involves sensitivity to reward, positive emotions, sociability, assertiveness and high energy.5
Consistent with this hypothesis, a study using a portable recording device reveals that extraverts are more talkative and social than introverts.6
In fact, extraversion predicts effective cognitive-social functioning across a variety of domains from cognitive performance and social endeavors to social economic status. For example, extraverts are better at decoding nonverbal social information than introverts.7
In addition, extraversion reliably predicts social activities, such as alcohol consumption, popularity, parties attended, dating variety, exercise,8 social support seeking,9 marital satisfaction,10 and job performance in sales and management positions.11
Finally, extraversion is negatively correlated with social phobia12 and suicidality.13 In sum, extraverts are more socially skilled than introverts.
In this study, we examined whether extraversion predicts individual differences in face recognition.
The accuracy in an immediate recognition memory task (i.e., the old/new task) on faces and flowers was used to calculate face-specific recognition ability, whereas the self-report score on extraversion dimension from the NEO Personality Inventory, Revised (NEO PI-R14) was used to measure social skills.
General cognitive abilities (i.e., general intelligence or IQ) were measured by Raven’s advanced progressive matrices (Raven APM15). Using both extreme selection analysis16 and correlational analysis, we found that extraverts were better at recognizing faces than introverts, but not at recognizing non-social stimuli. Furthermore, the link between extraversion and face recognition ability was independent from IQ.
Discussion
In this study, we examined the link between social skills and face recognition ability. We found that extraverts who show better social skills than introverts are also better at processing faces but not at processing non-face objects.
More importantly, the underlying facet that makes extraverts a better face recognizer is mainly due to gregariousness facet, but not other facets of extraversion that do not rely heavily on interpersonal interaction.
Finally, the link between inter-personal social activity (i.e., gregariousness) and face-specific recognition ability is independent of IQ. Our study provides the first evidence that links the face recognition ability and our daily activity in social communication.
It has been proposed for a long time that extraverts have certain abilities that are lacked in introverts, which make extraverts behave more socially than introverts.22–24
Among them is the ability to decode non-verbal social information, as introverts are impaired in extracting relevant social, affective and evaluative cues from the inter-personal environment.7
Our result is consistent with this hypothesis, showing that introverts were poorer in extracting social stimuli (i.e., faces), but their performance in recognizing non-social stimuli (i.e., flowers) was matched to extraverts.
Further, we show that the processing of face information was linked to a specific facet of extraversion that relays heavily on inter personal communication.
In other words, it is not the extraversion in general but the inter personal interaction in particular that makes extraverts a better face recognizer.
However, the link between extraversion and face-specific recognition ability does not specify the causal relation between these two variables.
It is possible that individuals who spend more time on inter personal interaction have more experiences with faces and/or are motivated to recognize faces.
Therefore, the face recognition ability is improved because of the environmental influences. This hypothesis is consistent with our previous genetic study where we have demonstrated substantial environmental influence on face recognition.1
On the other hand, individuals with poor face recognition ability (e.g., individuals with prosopagnosia or Autism) may become introverts after recurrent and sometimes traumatic social interaction difficulties caused by face recognition problems.4 Finally, the link between extraversion and face recognition ability might be due to a third factor that modulates both of them.
For example, the intranasal administration of a neuropeptide oxytocin not only improves the recognition of faces,25 but also increases trustworthy behaviors.26
In other words, because face recognition is highly interacted with daily social functions, it is possible that they might be evolutionally co-developed and may have a shared neural and/or genetic basis. Future studies are needed to address casual link between extraversion and face recognition ability.
Source:
University of Manchester
Media Contacts:
Karen Lander – University of Manchester
Image Source:
The image is adapted from the University of Manchester news release.
