It's not easy to find acquaintances in the crowd

Although you have been married for 10 years, it is difficult for you to find a husband or a wife in a crowd. That's because our brain sees the clutter of these faces as a fuzzy set of edges and lines.

This phenomenon, called crowding, occurs when people try to identify a certain acquaintance in a crowd.

" Crowding may reveal one of the basic mechanisms of the visual system, which is used to filter out the few pieces of useful information from a sea of ​​information, " said David Whitney, a psychologist at the Brain Center. and Thinking at Davis University, California, USA, said.

Whitney and colleagues conducted five experiments on volunteers to measure their ability to identify a familiar face or house in a crowd of other faces or houses. Photos will flash on the computer and the viewer must show the right face (or house) to the right, left or not displayed.

As a result, volunteers have twice the difficulty of identifying familiar faces surrounded by other frontal faces. When observing photos of houses or faces upside down, participants have little difficulty distinguishing goals.

Inferring from observing the screen on real life, the researchers conjectured that face-to-face photos interfered with each other, making it difficult to select a face in the crowd .

Research results can be used to treat patients with facial disorders or face impairment. In the long run, it can help scientists develop an artificial visual system that competes with people.

T. An