‘Face Facts’ say ScienceGrrl Psychologists

Posted on 11 March 2015

In celebration of International Women’s Day, Dr Kay Ritchie and Eilidh Noyes challenge visitors’ face perception skills at the Yorkshire Museum

On 8th March, the York branch of ScienceGrrl hosted an event at the Yorkshire museum to celebrate International Women’s Day. Along with other female scientists, our own Dr Kay Ritchie and Eilidh Noyes invited the public to engage with a series of interactive tasks and demonstrations as a way of sharing scientific knowledge and promoting women in science. Kay and Eilidh’s tasks demonstrated how we perceive familiar and unfamiliar faces. One of the demonstrations invited the public to become ‘Passport Officers’, could they tell if two photos were the same person or two different people? When we don’t know the people in the photos this is surprisingly difficult. However, other demonstrations showed how easily we can differentiate between faces (or recognise the same person in different images) when we are familiar with the people pictured.