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You can probably recall more faces than you might think. Most people can remember about 5000, according to a new study.

鈥淚t鈥檚 surprising, in that it seems to be overkill,鈥� says Rob Jenkins at the University of York in the UK. He points out that some people argue humans lived in groups of around 150 people for most of hominin evolutionary history, so it might make sense for us to recall about this number of faces. 鈥淚t turns out that whatever mental equipment we have to solve that task seems to also do this for many thousands of faces.鈥�

He and his team asked 25 people to spend an hour writing down the people they knew personally for whom they could form a clear mental image of their face, including friends and family, people at school or work, neighbours, and people they might know from local shops or who take the same bus or train.

On average, participants listed 40 people in the first 5 minutes and slowed to 21 people in the final 5 minutes. Based on this rate, Jenkins and his team calculated how many people each participant would have listed with unlimited time 鈥� on average it was 549 people.

Facial vocabulary

Then, they tested recognition of famous faces by showing the participants images of 3441 public figures from film, business, politics, sports and so on. Each participant saw two different pictures of each public figure on two separate days. If they said they recognised the celebrity in both pictures, that person was considered part of their 鈥榝acial vocabulary鈥�.

Participants recognised about 30 per cent of the celebrities. Based on this, Jenkins and his team calculated the ratio of recall-to-recognition and estimated that most people can recall about 5000 faces.

鈥淵ou couldn鈥檛 hope to bring to mind every face that you know on request, but by combining those two measures, we can make a good estimate,鈥� he says.

Jenkins says the mental representations we have of faces include the context in which we see those faces, as well as emotional associations. 鈥淚t鈥檚 nothing like a snapshot. It鈥檚 really a pretty sophisticated idea. And the brain can maintain a lot of those at one time,鈥� he says.