I dare her, says she, and I doubledare her
Are you someone who easily recognizes everyone you’ve ever met? Or maybe you struggle, even with familiar faces? It is already known that we are better at recognising faces from our own race but researchers have only recently questioned how we assimilate the information we use to recognise people.
New research by the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus has shown that when it comes to recognizing people the Malaysian Chinese have adapted their facial recognition techniques to cope with living in a multicultural environment.
Chrystalle Tan said: “Our research has shown that Malaysian Chinese adopt a unique looking pattern which differed from both Westerners and Mainland Chinese, possibly due to the multicultural nature of the country.”
The ability to recognize different faces may have social and evolutionary advantages. Human faces provide vital information about a person’s identity and characteristics such as gender, age, health and attractiveness. Although we all have the same basic features we have our own distinguishing features and there is evidence that the brain has a specialized mental module dedicated to face processing.
Previous research by a group at Glasgow University in Scotland showed that Asians from mainland China use more holistic recognition techniques to recognise faces than Westerners.
• Chinese focus on the centre of the face in the nose area
• Westerners focus on a triangular area between the eyes and mouth
• British born Chinese use both techniques fixating predominantly around either the eyes and mouth, or the nose
photo { Christine Osinski }
