How many faces do people know?

Abstract

Over our species history, humans have typically lived in small groups of under a hundred individuals. However, our face recognition abilities appear to equip us to recognize very many individuals, perhaps thousands. Modern society provides access to huge numbers of faces, but no one has established how many faces people actually know. Here, we describe a method for estimating this number. By combining separate measures of recall and recognition, we show that people know about 5000 faces on average and that individual differences are large. Our findings offer a possible explanation for large variation in identification performance. They also provide constraints on understanding the qualitative differences between perception of familiar and unfamiliar faces-a distinction that underlies all current theories of face recognition.

Keywords: face recognition; memory; mental representation; social group size.

Figure 1.

Combining different memory measures for personally known and famous faces. Recall estimates for each category are summed to produce a recall total (blue). Recall and recognition data for famous faces (red) are then compared to calculate a recall-to-recognition (R : R) ratio (purple). Increasing the recall total in this ratio leads to a final estimate (green). Error bars show residuals from the linear.