A research result that 'human beings can remember the face of 5000 people on average' is reported

by Rebecca Zaal

In the present age when people came to live in plain and crowded densities, humans would meet countless people during their time from birth to death. Some people have trouble saying "It is hard to remember the face of the person I met," but research results that "human beings can remember the face of 5000 people on average" were reported.

How many faces do people know? | Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/285/1888/20181319

Never forget a face? Research suggests people know an average of 5,000 faces | EurekAlert! Science News
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-10/uoy-nfa100818.php

An ordinary human recognizes thousands of faces: Research Highlights
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06998-7

In most of human history, the social group formed by people is small scale, each one was living in a widely dispersed manner. It can be said that from the long history of human beings it is very recent that the population has rapidly increased to form towns and cities and many people have come to meet.

As population density rises, you will see as many "people's faces" as possible, so you need to identify who your face is. The research team of Rob Jenkins , a psychologist at York University , conducted a survey on 25 college students, "How many people can remember the face of a person?"

Mr. Jenkins said, "Recognizing many individuals is a very important capability for human beings, by remembering what kind of behavior the people have done in the past and how they have something to do with them, I will decide how to respond to that person. " This research focuses on how many human faces the human brain identifies and whether "it can be remembered together with personal information etc".

by Dazzle Jam

All 25 participants were students at the University of Glasgow or Aberdeen , 15 of whom were women and 10 were men. The average age was 24 years old and the age was from 18 to 61 years old. To the participants, 30 pounds (about 4400 yen) was paid before the experiment, and thereafter it seems that additional compensation was paid according to the result of the exam.

In the experiment, we first asked participants to remember about "acquaintances who can think of their face clearly in the head because names do not have to be remembered." Participants can not remember personal names or names on spreadsheets that have been subjected to various categories such as "family" "friends" "friends' family" "school officials" "byte colleagues" "neighbors" In case it was said that he wrote the relationship to the wind such as "manager of school" "father of friend A".

Then, participants were able to remember 362 "faces distinctly identifiable individuals" on average on the 60-minute experiment. Also, in the first 5 minutes and the last 5 minutes, although the number of remembered faces is about half, few people have exhausted the memories that can be remembered during the 60 minutes of experiment time, and many people are still able to remember It was a result that there was a face. The research team finished the experiment in 60 minutes taking account of the fatigue of the participants, but by dropping recollectable face reduction into the calculation, people should finally be able to recall an average of 549 faces in average I guessed. This calculation seems to have not been very different from the result of the experiment that we went to the ten solicited participants later, "let us remember every face for 5 weeks outside the laboratory."

After having the personal acquaintance remembered, the research team reminded 25 participants about "a face not familiarly known, but a world famous face". As in the case of acquaintance, the research team arranges classifications such as "art", "media", "movie", "music", "historical figure" in the spreadsheet and creates a situation where participants can easily remember their names He said that. As a result, it was possible to recall an average of 290 faces during the 60-minute experiment, and after that the estimated value was 395 on average.

by Marco Derksen

Subsequently, the research team showed participants the "face photo data of a total of 6882 images of 3441 people who seems to be publicly famous," and tested how much recognition rate can be obtained. The list of 3441 people is based on "a list of people who are considered to be publicly known face" that 12 associates filled in the spreadsheet for three months in advance. The research team says, "This 3441 people do not cover exactly the list of publicly famous people, but they are at least enough to measure performance."

Participants said that he did the judgment of "knowing" or "not knowing" about the face photograph of 3441 people by pushing the button at hand, divided into A version and B version. In version B, which was performed after version A, only when a different facial photograph was used for 3441 people, the same as version A, and it was judged that both of the two types of face photographs were "know", "participant I know this person. "

As a result, participants were able to judge correctly "know" about 775 faces on average. On the other hand, the performance of the participants was greatly different, there were people who could discriminate only about 400 out of 3441 people, there seemed to be some people who could distinguish nearly 2000 people. People with low performance in version A tended to have a lower performance even in version B, so it is inferred that there is a big difference in the ability of people to remember their faces.

According to the research team, the proportion of "celebrities remembered in the laboratory" included in the face photograph data of 3441 people is about 61%, and 39% of the celebrities individually remembered by 25 participants were 3441 people It seems that it did not appear in the data set of. Based on these data, the research team got out the ratio "Number of faces remembered in the head: Number of faces that can actually be recognized = 1: 4.62". By applying the average of the number of faces remembered in the head (549 + 395 = 944) to the flared ratio, the research team argues that "People can recognize the face of approximately 4240 people."

by Kaique Rocha

The number of faces that participants believe to remember is a very wide range of 1000 to 10,000 persons, but it is within a certain range, and "The number of 4240 people can be rounded to about 5000 people" and the research team Concluded. Mr. Jenkins said about the result of this time, "It is a very interesting question as to where the peak of the number of faces remembered in human life comes is a very interesting question, maybe you may remember a new face throughout your life, You may forget your face one after another when you reach your age. "