Dr. Janata's research into music and memory featured in Wall Street Journal Online
Ken Nakayama (Harvard): "On the range and scope of human face recognition abilities"
Ken Nakayama is the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.
| What | Guest Speaker |
|---|---|
| When |
2009-06-05 12:10 PM
2009-06-05 01:00 PM
June 05, 2009 from 12:10 pm to 01:00 pm |
| Where | 267 Cousteau Pl., Large Conference Room |
| Contact Name | Noelle Blalock |
| Contact Email | nsblalock@ucdavis.edu |
| Contact Phone | 530-297-4452 |
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Abstract:
Because so much of our life is social and because noticing subtle changes in faces is so important in navigating our extraordinarily complex social life, we humans are face recognition experts. Perhaps it should not be a surprise that our expertise is broadly based. We rely on the many differences that exist between one face and another. Configural processing is present but small local features are also important. Very recently, and to our surprise, we have found that the ability to learn new faces does not peak in late adolescence as previously assumed but occurs later, in our early thirties. Furthermore, our abilities decline rather slowly after this point. Some people (developmental prosopagnosics) are very bad a face recognition, so much so that they can be severely handicapped in real life. Some of these deficits are restricted to faces but others have a more general visual memory loss. To our surprise, the ability to discriminate other subtle differences in faces (emotion, gender, attractiveness) is mostly intact despite major problems in recognizing individuals. We have also identified others at the opposite end of the spectrum, whom we call super-recognizers. Quantitatively, these individuals appear to be as extraordinarily good as prosopagnosics are regretfully bad, suggesting a wide range of face recognition capacities in the human population. It's likely that face recognition abilities have a genetic basis independent of other mental faculties because face recognition problems run in families and face recognition scores in MZ twins show extremely high correlations. We discuss these results in terms of contemporary accounts of face processing as well as their possible relation to more general concepts of perception, memory and learning.
Exploring the Mind Speaker Series - Dr. Paul Ekman, UC San Francisco