“Characters from Irish soap operas and The Simpsons have been used in ESRC-funded research into how we get to learn people’s faces.

Observations during the 1970s of witnesses mis-remembering unfamiliar people from crime scenes has led to a lot of investigation into face recognition over the years. Today’s rapidly increasing use of CCTV images makes the subject as topical as ever.

Previous research has shown that comparing images of unfamiliar faces to see whether they show the same person is highly prone to error, even when the pictures are high quality and the faces are shown at the same time to avoid relying on memory. By contrast, recognising familiar faces can be highly accurate, even when the image quality is extremely poor.

The aim of a new study led by Professor Vicki Bruce, now at Edinburgh University, was to investigate how faces become familiar to us.” EurekAlert!