Do you remember faces?

AngryCorvair (Forum Supporter) said:

Appleseed said:

In reply to Grtechguy :

I know a lot of guys named Buddy.

I only know one. He's a hell of a guitar player. 

Hey! I know that Guy!

Apparently that "back drawer" of your mind keeps most of the faces you see and uses them in your dreams.  So everyone in your dreams is an actual person, even if you only saw them briefly and in passing.

chandler said:

Yours is almost exactly the same as mine.

Maybe we just know the same people.

Mr_Asa said:

In reply to Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) :

Question for you, what group did you find the hardest?  I feel I did incredibly poorly with the female, Asian, non-Indian faces in the test.  I'd love to see a breakdown of racial groups and how I fared with remembering them.  Makes me wonder if there is a link to how well you do and your background.  

It does invite interesting questions on their test, and the inherent bias of using a population similar to the local area, though.  Its kind of obvious that they used a population similar to what you'd find in Australia.  I don't remember seeing any black people, or any hispanic/latino groups in the test. White, Indian, and other Asian groups were the only ones in there.

Wonder if anyone on their research team has thought of that

I was actually thinking about the same exact thing while I was taking the test.  It was interesting to see that the [somewhat racist] phrase "they all look the same" actually played out right in front of my eyes.

For me it was the ones who appeared East Asian or Middle Eastern/Arab nations.  The ones that presented/appeared as Indian/Pakistani or European were confident for me.  Not sure how many white people I actually got right, but when I looked at the pictures, the white people were simple.  The East Asian-presenting photos I found myself looking desperately for a mole, a nostril shape, or an ear shape, but just the few seconds of viewing the whole face it was difficult for me to identify them.

My theory on that is possibly my upbringing.  My area was predominantly white with a small-ish proportion of Indian, Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Black.  We had maybe five East Asian kids in a high school with 2400 students.  Perhaps my brain just has more synapses that are trained to distinguish the phenotypes to which I was more frequently introduced?

Javelin said:

GRM needs one of these tests but with cars and faces instead of names. I can totally go to an autocross and be like "yeah you had the Mariner Blue NA Miata in STS2 in 2007!" to random face with zero recollection of name.

That's me. I have raced with some guys for 25 years and help them work on their stuff but have no idea what their name is. The core group that we race with all the time I know, but some of them we see 3 or 4 time a year, nope. My wife will ask me who someone is and I can tell her what car they are with, how long I have "known" them but not a name. So she devised a plan to learn names. She will walk up and I'll say, this is my wife, Lynn, and they normally say hey, I'm Billy Bob Joe Don or what ever. 

I scored pretty much exactly what everyone else posted.  Which is interesting.  I have to say I had very little confidence in most of my answers though (I am pretty sure almost all the second sets where the same person).  I have had a lot of exposure to Asian faces and a fair amount of Indian BTW.

I was very aware of the racial breakdown also.  I know it's Australia, but they do have an aboriginal population.  I had to look it up and it's only 3% (they make up 28% of their prison population though!!), so, probably why there are none in the test.

But... the combined Chinese and Indian population in Australia only make up about 5% of the population.  The test was at least 50% (maybe more like 75%) Indian and Asian.  You are required to participate in a study as a psych student normally (in the US), so I suspect these are all students. Based on how things are in the US, I suspect there are a lot of foreign students in Australian Universities.  Although, I do tend to suspect the purpose of this test has something specifically to do with the obviously predominant races.

Since they did quiz your race initially, that may have affected the presentation, but I don't want to mess with their study by doing it again as a different race.

And yes... I do tend to "read into" studies.

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/ethnic-background-of-australians.html

Once at a church Christmas program I was recording on an old video camera and I mixed up my Korean daughter with another Korean girl the same age and I taped the wrong kid.  I don't even know my kids face.  Doh!

It wouldn't surprise me if the test wasn't about recognizing general faces, rather something about quantifying racial discrimination or misidentification.

27/50/64

Odd for a tire size, typical for a white American male

OK, I think I am going to have to call shenanigans here.  We have three people who have taken this and posted their results and they are almost exactly the same (mine were very close as I remember).  This seems very very unlikely. I don't think there is any perceptual test that would result in this tight of a distribution.

 If it is true though, it's very very bizarre.  I am going to see if my wife will take it and see what she gets (and note the races).

To be clear I am not calling what they are studying BS (which you don't really know and many times that is very important) just what it appears to be studying.  Makes me even more curious what they are actuall studying though.

OK, my wife toke the test.  She is of Asian decent (grew up mostly around whitey).  I watched her take it.  She got the exact faces, in the same order.  She was very uncertain of her answers and scored...  27/44/59.  Very similar.

I am now suspicious the main point of the test is the last set of test, which I am pretty sure are all of the same person (something both of us thought about half way through it).  The actual test being the ability for people to recognize people presented slightly differently, and the point of that being the reliability of eye witness identifications, which I think have been shown to be VERY unreliable for a while now (excepting very obvious physical differences of course).

A few weeks ago, a guy came into the shop I manage looking for some paint for his truck. Turns out I recognized him and went to high school with him. I asked him about the truck he drove in high school and he confirmed that he still has it.

aircooled said:

OK, my wife toke the test.  She is of Asian decent (grew up mostly around whitey).  I watched her take it.  She got the exact faces, in the same order.  She was very uncertain of her answers and scored...  27/44/59.  Very similar.

I am now suspicious the main point of the test is the last set of test, which I am pretty sure are all of the same person (something both of us thought about half way through it).  The actual test being the ability for people to recognize people presented slightly differently, and the point of that being the reliability of eye witness identifications, which I think have been shown to be VERY unreliable for a while now (excepting very obvious physical differences of course).

I wanted to give it a go to test your theory.  Here's my scores:

On the UNSW Face Memory Test you scored 20 out of 40.

On the UNSW Face Sorting Test you scored 51 out of 80.

Your overall score on the UNSW Face Test was 59%.

My first score is a fair bit lower than yours (I'm terrible with names and faces.  Much better with cars and dogs).  Second score was a little higher (I think I kind of caught on to what was going on and started picking landmarks on faces to try to match up).  Third score is the same... 

Meh.  It was a good way to kill some time