Recognition

It can be quite embarrassing when you don’t recognize someone you’ve met before—especially when that person remembers you. If remembering others is something that’s important in your job or your other hobbies it can be especially troublesome to forget faces.

To recognize faces, the brain follows a visual stream. It starts with basic visual information and it ends in the “fusiform face area,” a part of the brain that many scientists believe is dedicated to facial recognition. Recognition, an exercise from BrainHQ’s People Skills category, is designed to exercise the fusiform face area. It does so by quickly showing a face, then asking you to identify who you saw from a selection of faces.

Here’s how the exercise works:

1. A face will briefly appear on screen, and then disappear. Remember this face.
   
2. Several faces will be displayed. Select the face that briefly appeared in Step 1 above.
   

If an incorrect answer is given, you’ll hear a “bonk” sound, the correct answer is shown, and the target face in following turns may appear for a longer period of time. If a correct answer is given, you’ll hear a “boop” sound and the target face in following turns may appear for a shorter period of time. In both cases, the level then continues, repeating from Step 1 above.

You can review the exercise video tutorial below:

Recognition from BrainHQ from Posit Science on Vimeo.

As you progress through Recognition it becomes more challenging in these ways:

• The angle of the face changes. First, you have to match a face looking straight ahead to the same face looking straight ahead. But later, you must match a face looking straight ahead with one looking at a 45 degree angle or in profile.
• The number of faces you have to choose from increases, from 3 to 6.
• At first, faces of all genders are mixed together. In later levels, all faces are the same gender, making them harder to tell apart.