14 DAY TRIAL // The fact that not all people are equally capable of recognizing faces has been made painfully obvious to many. But researchers have always been unclear about what brain area or neural process is underlying the difference. A new study now proposes an interesting explanation for this.
The research proposes that individuals who are able to perceive and process new faces in a holistic manner are also more capable of remembering them later on. Here, the term holistic refers to seeing the face as a whole, all components fitting together in a larger image.
The extent to which each person perceives the world around them in a holistic manner naturally varies from individual to individual, and some are way better at it than others. The fact that this phenomenon in itself exists is very weird.
Evolutionarily speaking, there is no incentive to have this variation, or at least no immediately apparent one, says Beijing Normal University cognitive psychologist Jia Liu. The study the Chinese team carried out provided the first experimental insight into the nature of this natural variability.
“Individuals who process faces more holistically are better at face recognition,” explains Liu, referring to the main conclusion of the research. Details of the work will appear in an upcoming issue of the medical journal Psychological Science.
When we see a new person, our brains process what we see both holistically and analytically – that is, in integrated and individual manners. The analytical process, in this case, revolves around studying the mouth, the eyes, the ears and the nose as individual components, rather than as parts of a whole.
The interesting thing about this is that holistic visual processing mostly comes into play when we're dealing with other human beings, and not inanimate objects. When taking this into account, it becomes easy to understand why the holistic component of face recognition is so critical in our species.
“Knowing that the mind receives a face as one whole thing and not as a collection of individual parts, we may train people on holistic processing to improve their ability in recognizing faces,” Liu believes.
“Our findings partly explains why some never forget faces, while others misrecognize their friends and relatives frequently,” the expert adds. Any imbalance between holistic and analytical visual processing can lead to dysfunctions, PsychCentral reports.
People suffering from conditions such as prosopagnosia and autism could benefit extensively from this new research, if investigators are able to translate the results into widely-applicable therapies.