HOW DO
FACE-RECOGNITION & DRAWING SKILLS RELATE TO ONE ANOTHER?
Come
and take part in an exciting experiment happening all day June 1st
in the Gallery to see how good your face recognition ability is and contribute
to science.
Face
blindness, super-recognition and the brain
We see and recognize faces everyday
without even realizing it. However, what if the ability to recognize faces was
taken from you and you couldn’t recognize your loved ones, your colleagues or
famous people in the media? As a consequence of brain damage some individuals
suffer from prosopagnosia, or face-blindness, as exemplified in ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife
For A Hat’. Face-blindness causes people to have extreme difficulty in
recognizing familiar faces which can have negative consequences on everyday
life, social confidence, etc.
At the other end of the spectrum, super-recognizers are exceptionally good at recognizing faces. Super-recognizers
can sometimes remember the face of someone they saw for a fleeting moment, many
years earlier!
Understanding how faces are recognized
generally can hopefully help neuroscientists develop rehabilitation techniques
to improve face-recognition for those with face-blindness.
We are particularly interested in how
individuals who pay particular attention to visual detail, such as artists,
perform on our visual memory tests. We would be delighted if you were able to
participate in this research.
