Chapter 3 Introduction

Faces convey a wealth of information that is critical to social interactions, such as identity and emotion. Moreover, because all faces contain the same features (eyes, nose, mouth) in the same general configuration (eyes above nose, nose above mouth), distinguishing between individuals is a visually demanding task. Despite this, we are able to recognize individuals across a variety of superficial perceptual changes in lighting or viewpoint. Face recognition is critical to social interaction and it has received extensive attention from researchers using a range of methods. A human face reveals a great deal of information to a perceiver. It can tell about mood and intention and attentiveness, but it can also serve to identify a person. Of course, a person can be identified by other means than the face. Voice, body shape, gait or even clothing may all establish identity in circumstances where facial detail may not be available. Nevertheless, a face is the most distinctive and widely used key to a person’s identity, and the loss of ability to recognize faces experienced by some neurological (prosopagnosic) patients has a profound effect on their lives. Here, we explore some of the psychological aspect of how faces are related by humans to beauty standards, commnication, familiarity and how human beings perceives faces and which facial or face related features are preferred by most of the students in the society.

3.1 Objective

The motive of conducting this study is mentioned below-

  • Finding out the overall face recognition ability among the college students of India and visualizing the results.

  • Understanding the underlying correlation between the items(or questions asked) by different domains or aspects of face recognition(see next section).

  • Understanding the underlying correlation between the different domains of face recognition.

  • Finding out the domains and item’s connection with the way faces are percieved by the society.

  • Observing the trend in the response like the composition of the overall face recognition score.

3.2 Importance

Studies like this is very important in understanding the face recognition ability in psychology. Some reasons of why such studies are of great importance are as follows-

  • Human faces are a very important mean to communicate and interact with others, understanding how human faces are percieved by society would help us know the importance of interacting face to face

  • Understanding the the preferences of some facial features and overall looks over other, so as to erradiate any bias.

  • Helps in understanding human-human interaction.

  • Better understand the variables involved in study which can be as complex as social understanding, attention and perception, memory etc.