Cari Nierenberg writes: Getting older -- or at least getting past your 20s -- means getting better at recognizing faces.
People in their early 30s topped all other age groups at remembering an unfamiliar mug, suggests a new study in the journal Cognition.
In findings that even surprised researchers, the ability to learn faces seems to reach its peak between age 30 and 34 rather than in the early 20s, when the brain reaches full maturity and other mental talents, such as recalling names and solving problems, appear to hit their heyday.
"Face recognition takes a long time to get really good at," explained Laura Germine, a graduate student in psychology at Harvard University who led the study team. "It takes a lot of years and experience to fine tune it."
In the first of three experiments, nearly 45,000 people ages 10 to 70 went online and took a 15-minute facial recognition test. Participants were first asked to learn six computer-generated facial images (all young, white males), and then they had to identify the face from different angles or in different lighting.
Men and women slightly beyond the big three-oh outperformed everyone by correctly identifying faces about 83 percent of the time.
"We don't know why face recognition peaks at this age but my hunch is it's about visual experience, which makes the specialized machinery in the brain get better at it," Germine said.
In two other tests, folks in their early 30s were better at recalling the faces of adults and children, but people a decade younger were superior at linking names with faces and picking out faces when images were turned upside down.
Story: Unable to recognize voices, unless it's Sean Connery
A flair for faces comes in handy: You'll be charming at cocktail parties and good at fingering a perp in a police lineup.
One limitation of the study is that test takers were not asked for their ethnicity. So it's possible that more Caucasians in their early 30s participated in the research, and they might be better at placing faces of the same race, said Germine.
Challenge your brain to the same test used for this research at http://www.testmybrain.org/. Scroll down just a bit, and click on "Face Recognition, Emotion Perception, and Personality." How'd you do?
