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Psychologists find skill in recognizing
faces peaks after age 30
Finding rebuts pervasive belief that all mental faculties
top out in early adulthood
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Dec. 21, 2010 -- Scientists have made the
surprising discovery that our ability to
recognize and remember faces peaks at age 30
to 34, about a decade later than most of our
other mental abilities.
Researchers Laura T. Germine and Ken Nakayama of Harvard
University and Bradley Duchaine of Dartmouth
College will present their work in a
forthcoming issue of the journalCognition.
While prior evidence had suggested that face recognition
might be slow to mature, Germine says few
scientists had suspected that it might
continue building for so many years into
adulthood. She says the late-blooming nature
of face recognition may simply be a case of
practice making perfect.
"We all look at faces, and practice face-watching, all the
time," says Germine, a Ph.D. student in
psychology at Harvard. "It may be that the
parts of the brain we use to recognize faces
require this extended period of tuning in
early adulthood to help us learn and
remember a wide variety of different faces."
Germine, Duchaine, and Nakayama used the web-based
Cambridge Face Memory Test -- available at
www.testmybrain.org -- to test recognition
of computer-generated faces among some
44,000 volunteers ages 10 to 70. They found
that skill at other mental tasks, such as
remembering names, maxes out at age 23 to
24, consistent with previous research.
But on a face-recognition task, skill rose sharply from age
10 to 20, then continued increasing more
slowly throughout the 20s, reaching a peak
of 83 percent correct responses in the
cohort ages 30 to 34.
A follow-up experiment involving computer-generated
children's faces found a similar result,
with the best face recognition seen among
individuals in their early 30s. After this,
skill in recognizing faces declined slowly,
with the ability of 65-year-olds roughly
matching that of 16-year-olds.
"Research on cognition has tended to focus on development,
to age 20, and aging, after age 55," Germine
says. "Our work shows that the 35 years in
between, previously thought to be fairly
static, may in fact be more dynamic than
many scientists had expected."
