Research has shown when photos of an individual’s face are judged too dissimilar to go together, people will tend to think they show several different identities<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Scientists from the University of Bristol tested this concept further by exploring what happens when the photos show faces with different expressions.<\/p>\n Annabelle Redfern from the School of Experimental Psychology led this research which has been published in the journal\u00a0i-Perception<\/em>.<\/p>\n She said: “We created packs of 40 cards, each card showing a different face. The packs were either of neutral, un-expressive faces, or of highly expressive faces. We asked people to sort the packs into piles, so that there was a pile for each person.<\/p>\n “Even though there were only two different faces in the packs, people tended to think there were many more — between five and eight on average.<\/p>\n “But when the faces were expressive, people also made another type of mistake: they confused the identities<\/strong>, and were more likely to place photos of both faces together, as if they were of the same person.”<\/p>\n This study shows that expressive faces can cause identity confusions, where photos of different people are thought to be of the same person.<\/p>\n It also demonstrates that we don’t ignore, or factor out, expressions when we recognise someone from their face<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Annabelle added: “The next stage in this research, following up on this study, is to explore what happens when we increase the familiarity of a face.<\/p>\n “As we start to learn a face, and how it expresses itself, then we find that expressions stop hindering the recognition process.<\/p>\n “This makes a lot of sense, if you think about your own experience with faces; if you know someone, you will recognise their face, irrespective of what expression it has.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the\u00a0University of Bristol press release: Photos of the same person can look substantially different. For example, your passport photo may look quite different from your driving licence, or your… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[60],"tags":[18,363,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23709"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23709"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23709\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23803,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23709\/revisions\/23803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/Face-300x200.jpg\")
Photos of the same person can look substantially different<\/strong>. For example, your passport photo may look quite different from your driving licence, or your face in holiday photos. In fact, these differences can mean you look like a different person from one photo to the next, to those that don’t know you.<\/p>\n