Imagine that you are sitting in a coffee shop, peacefully eating your cannoli and sipping your latte. As you look out the window, you notice someone approach
a parked car, smash the window, and steal something out of the front seat of the car. Your calm afternoon quickly becomes anxiety-ridden: your leg bounces, your voice shakes, your heart pounds, your stomach churns, and your mind races. You catch a glimpse of the criminal’s face as they are running off, and you promptly call 911. But did you know that the anxiety that you experienced when witnessing the crime could impact your ability to remember the criminal’s face later? We tend to recognize faces pretty easily, especially when someone is familiar to us, so you’re probably thinking that you would also be able to recognize the criminal’s face without a problem. After all, you did just watch them commit a crime right in front of your eyes. 
Your anxiety about the situation may have impaired your ability to recognize that person’s face, though, and a recent study conducted by Curtis, Russ, and Ackland (2015) sought to determine why and how this happens. Their research wanted to see how a spike in anxiety impacts someone’s ability to remember a face. More specifically, they wanted to know when the time of onset of anxiety is most impactful (before or after seeing a face) and whether or not anxiety increases stereotypes, or assumptions about the thoughts, actions, and behaviors another group of people, when someone is recognizing a face that is a different ethnicity than their own.
Read more…
Stepbrothers: click the image
Imagine feeling around in your kitchen’s miscellaneous junk drawer in the dark—among rubber bands, lighters, pencil sharpeners, and notepads—for a ballpoint pen. Not a pencil, and certainly not a highlighter. But that specific shape of pen. You know what a pen feels like, having felt them and seen them many times before, so the dark gives you no issue and you pull out exactly what you are looking for.
Our bodies have many ways of interacting with surroundings and objects. All senses powerfully work together to interpret what an object is based on its size, weight, texture, color, even smell. Sometimes these senses are isolated, so we rely on solely on sight or exclusively on touch, seemingly very different methods we employ. Having great visual interpretation, as if you have a keen eye for painting styles, seems to not necessarily make you better at identifying a sculptor’s work by touching and feeling the art. (Make sure to wait until the docent has their back turned!) But much like training your body to run faster can help you swim better, training one sense could improve another.
Read more…
That face. I know that face. How do I know that face? Do I wave? Do I know them that well? Everyone has had that experience where they recognize someone’s face, and you may know absolutely nothing about the person, but you know you’ve seen their face before.
How can we recognize people’s faces so easily? Facial recognition is a highly specialized process, and is incredibly accurate. Facial features such as the eyes, nose, mouth, the distance between features, and the shapes of features help us to identity a person’s face. But when we are in a very emotional situation, are we still as good at facial recognition as we are in regular situations? Read more…
It happens to everyone: you’re walking around campus when all of a sudden you see “Hottie Number One” or “Hot Girl Number Three,” or “Hot Dude From Dana.” We are students on a small campus; therefore, we start to recognize people after just a few weeks of being here. But why do we recognize some people more than others? Based upon personal interactions, people from all aspects of the sexuality spectrum seem to say that they run into “Hottie Number One” more often than they do other people. Perhaps even more interesting is that people seem to recognize potentially compatible hotties – straight people tend notice straight hotties whereas gay people tend to notice gay hotties. What makes us recognize the hotties better than we do other people? And how do we manage to focus on potentially compatible hotties? What about the hotties with non-compatible sexual orientations?
Read more…
We often forget many things in our lives. We forget where we left our keys as we’re running out the door in the morning; we forget what we had for breakfast; and sometimes we even forget what day it is. But one thing it seems we can always rely on is our ability to remember and discriminate between different faces. Our ability to recognize faces takes place without us even realizing it. It is something we take for granted because it is a very basic part of being a human being—recognizing the people in our world—our close family and friends who we see often, and even people we only encounter occasionally.
Because we are so good at recognizing faces, scientists have long wondered whether there are specific areas in the brain dedicated solely to facial recognition, or, rather, if there are more generic areas in the brain that recognize all things that we have a lot of experience with, and are in turn “experts” at (one such thing being faces).
But how do you even go about testing something like this? It may seem easy, but it is actually quite a challenging and intriguing dilemma. It may seem that all you would need to do would be to compare people’s ability to recognize faces with their ability to recognize other objects, but that would only answer half the question. A difference in ability doesn’t give any insight into whether there is a specific area or process in the brain specialized to just faces.
Read more…
Do you believe in first impressions? Have you ever made a snapshot judgment about someone based on a brief interaction? All of us have experienced meeting someone new. Some studies suggest that after a mere seven seconds, we have already formed a first impression of that person. According to our impression of the person, we act and behave accordingly. Yet, we should ask ourselves, “How valid are our first impressions?”
Have you ever sat on a train and squirmed with discomfort because the guy next to you just seems “creepy?” Can you pinpoint what exactly makes him look creepy? Are his eyes set too close to each other? Do his eyes look beady? Is his nose crooked? This poor guy is probably just staring out the window like the rest of the people on the train, probably just waiting to get to work. Although you have never met him before, his neutral facial expression somehow conveys a sense of untrustworthiness. Since he looks creepy, you will ignore him and maybe even move away from him. This example exhibits the dominant influence of perceived trustworthiness.
Read more…
Every day, we constantly recognize and process countless faces; faces of our friends, classmates, strangers, professors, etc. Of the innumerable number of faces we see a day, what dictates what makes some faces more memorable than others? New research suggests that our personal motives, and goals at a given time, have a profound effect on face perception and memory. In the article The Allure of Status: High-Status Targets Are Privileged in Face Processing and Memory, the authors examine the effects of social status on facial recognition and perception.
Evidence suggests that our particular motives influence how we perceive faces: for example, men at a bar are more likely to notice attractive women at first in order to fulfill their goals associated with finding a mate. People also tend to selectively align themselves with who they perceive to be powerful and dominant individuals; this can explain why many women might be drawn more to a guy who is dressed well, or who is driving a nice car, since those are “status” symbols, representing the opportunity of a better life. The goal of the experiment was to see if higher-status faces could be recognized more frequently than lower-status faces, and how social status influences holistic processing (how we view faces as a whole rather than by individual features) and feature integration (how we create a unified representation by combining features).
Read more…
I remember my cousin giving me tips on how to be left alone while riding the subway. “Wear a hooded sweatshirt that is too big for you,” Chris said, “and also wear headphones with music too loud, rap is always good. And put on a mean look, like you’re not someone to mess with; be unfriendly. No one wants to mess with me when I do that, they take one look at me and they stay away. It usually gets me a bench all to myself.” At first, hearing this surprised me. I couldn’t believe that people were that quick to judge others but I found myself thinking of all the times I had ridden on the bus or train. With one glance at someone I was able to make judgments on whether or not to sit near them. Chris’ description of how to keep people away fit my own judgment of who to stay clear of. That was when I first realized how much people rely on first impressions. Most times, our first impressions are based on the appearance of a person; their physical appearance. Our judgments are usually quick and automatic and don’t necessarily change until we interact with the other person more.
Read more…
Learning names is a challenge for most of us, and we all occasionally have that one person we just can’t quite remember. But is there a pattern who we remember and who we don’t? If you belong to a minority, as I do, there’s probably been at least one time when you’ve probably been frustrated and offended because people seem to always confuse you with the few other members of your race. For example, I was one of the only two Asian girls in my high school. This inevitably led to teachers calling me Jane half the time, and Cathy the other half. But should we be offended? Or is there actual legitimacy behind this unintentional racism? The cross-race effect in memory is the idea that humans are actually better at remembering faces that are the same race as them, relative to other races. Hourihan, Fraundorf, and Benjamin further analyzed this effect in their 2013 study on how cross-race effect relates to face memory.
Read more…
Recent Comments