Do I know you?: Study shows that women are better at remembering faces and names than men
- Out of 10 faces, women on average recognized seven, while men would recognize five or six
- The small difference has huge consequences on the social lives of both sex
- Researchers using results to construct a training program to improve facial recognition with older adults
Do you ever get that feeling when you see someone in the gym, the grocery store, or on the street and think 'I know them from somewhere' but blank on their name?
Well apparently that feeling happens more often in men than women according to a new study published recently in the journal, Psychological Science.
The study was conducted at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. Researchers used a helmet with built-in eye-tracking technology to track the movement of the participant's eyes.
Female memory: A study published in Psychological Science found that women are better at remembering faces and names than their male counterparts
One experiment involved introducing test subjects to 120 faces with their names over a four-day period. After that they were given sets of 10 photographs and asked if they'd 'met' the person before, and what that person's name was.
A shorter version of the experiment was conducted over just one day.
Researchers found a small, but significant difference in women's ability to recognize their acquaintances.
Why women remember: One of the authors of the study, Jennifer Heisz, says women in general have better episodic memory, which may account for why they remember faces more than men
Jennifer Heisz, one of the authors of the study explains their finding to NBC News: 'Let's say you just were introduced to 10 new people. On average women recognize seven faces, whereas men would only recognize five or six faces.'
While that doesn't seem like a big difference, Heisz says it has a surprisingly larger consequence for the male sex. That small difference in facial recognition means men end up in more socially awkward situations than women.
The question now is why are women better at remembering faces than men. This is a question that the study didn't look into, but Heisz has a few theories of her own.
'Our eye movements are really linked with out attention, so it could be related to women paying more attention to being more socially engaged with people,' Heisz said.
Another theory is that women process visual information in a different way. Heisz explains that, in general, women tend to have superior episodic memory - the ability to recall specific scenes from your past. Remembering a face could be an extension of that ability.
But Heisz says guys shouldn't be too ashamed, saying remembering someone's face is a difficult thing.
'There's so much going on when you are first meeting someone, right? You have to learn their face - and this is a really complex thing,' Heisz said. 'I mean you have two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, but so does everyone!'
The key, she says is finding the subtle differences that make one face unique.
'It's not surprising that some of us struggle with this,' she said.
The next step: The researchers are working on a training program that will use what they learned in the study to help older persons improve their facial recognition
But there is hope - not just for men, but all who struggle with remembering faces.
Heisz believes that they can translate what they learned into a training program to help people - especially older adults - become better at remembering faces. This will help older people feel less isolated, Heisz says.
In a university press release, co-author David Shore said 'the results open the possibility that changing our eye movement pattern may lead to better memory.'
So guys can actually improve by critically changing the way they absorb a person's face on first encounter.
'Additional exposures to the faces reduced sex differences in face recognition,' Heisz said, 'Which suggest that males may be able to improve their recognition memory by extracting more information at encoding through scanning.'
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