Weird Science
We remember names over faces
Research out of the UK reveals we are better at remembering names than faces.
The study’s authors, from the University of York, suggest that when we castigate ourselves for forgetting someone’s name, we are placing unfair demands on our brains.
Remembering a person’s face relies on recognition but remembering their name is a matter of recall, and it is well established that humans are much better at the former than the latter. The researchers also point out that we only become aware that we have forgotten a name when we have already recognised the face.
We rarely have to confront the problem of knowing a name, but not a face.
For the study, the researchers designed a “fair test”, pitting names against faces on a level playing field. They set up an experiment to place equal demands on the ability of participants to remember faces and names by testing both in a game of recognition.
The results showed participants scored consistently higher at remembering names than faces — recognising as little as 64 per cent of faces and up to 83 per cent of names in the tests.
“Our study suggests that, while many people may be bad at remembering names, they are likely to be even worse at remembering faces,” Dr Rob Jenkins said.
“This will surprise many as it contradicts our intuitive understanding . . . if we eliminate the double standards we are placing on memory, we start to see a different picture.”
Babies laugh like chimps
Few things delight an adult more than the uninhibited, effervescent laughter of a baby.
Yet baby laughter, a new study shows, differs from adult laughter in a key way: babies laugh as they exhale and inhale, in a manner that is remarkably similar to nonhuman primates.
A team led by Associate Professor Disa Sauter, of the University of Amsterdam, looked at laughter clips taken from 44 infants and children between 3 and 18 months of age.
The recordings, taken from online videos in which babies were engaged in playful interactions, were analysed by 102 listeners, recruited from a psychology student population, who evaluated the extent to which the laughs were produced on the exhale versus the inhale.
Sauter and her colleagues found that the youngest babies commonly laughed on inhalation and exhalation, as do non-human primates like chimpanzees.
In the older babies, laughter was primarily produced only on the exhale, as is the case in older children and adults.
“Adult humans sometimes laugh on the inhale but the proportion is markedly different from that of infants’ and chimps’ laughs,” Sauter says.
“Our results suggest that this is a gradual, rather than a sudden, shift.”
She noted that these results were based on the judgments of non-expert listeners.
“We are currently checking those results against judgments by phoneticians, who are making detailed annotations of the laughter.”
Selfies worsen narcissism
A study has established that excessive use of social media, in particular, the posting of images and selfies, is associated with a subsequent increase in narcissism.
It looked at personality changes of 74 individuals aged 18 to 34 over a four-month period, and also assessed their use of social media, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, during the same period.
Narcissism is a personality characteristic that can involve grandiose exhibitionism, beliefs relating to entitlement, and exploiting others.
Those who used social media excessively, through visual postings, displayed an average 25 per cent increase in such narcissistic traits over the four months of the study.
This increase took many of these participants above the clinical cut-off for narcissistic personality disorder, according to the measurement scale used.
The study also found that those who primarily used social media for verbal postings, such as Twitter, did not show these effects.
All but one of the people in the study used social media, and their average use was about three hours a day, excluding usage for work, but some reported using social media for as much as eight hours a day for non-work related purposes.