Guess Who?
Telling apart identical twins can be embarrassingly difficult at first, so it’s pretty nice to be able to tell apart the rest of the population from one another. But what about those people we see that we give a second glance because they resemble a classmate? Or what about stunt doubles? In the movies, stunt doubles resemble the main actors so closely that we can’t see the difference. But in real life, if we saw Johnny Depp and his stunt double side by side, we would easily be able to see who’s who. This is because of the way the brain recognizes faces.
It’s thanks to the right middle fusiform gyrus, located in the temporal lobe, that we can recognize faces. The brain’s method of recognizing faces is a vital survival mechanism that has had essential social implications. Its evolution allows us to distinguish friend from foe. It is important socially, allowing us to recognize individuals at a moment’s glance and perpetuating social interaction. One very useful skill is the ability to tell that a face is the same face in different settings of brightness and at different angles. Faces can look starkly dissimilar when looking at them at eye level or from below. Our ability to see the same face from different angles is evolutionarily important because, again, it enables immediate recognition and favors continuity, also explaining why we are better at identifying familiar faces.
We all know that stunt doubles appear in movies for brief periods of time to perform dangerous and impressive feats that the main actors just can’t do. For this brief period of time, our fusiform gyrus is tricked into perceiving the stunt double as the same actor. This goes back to how our brains enjoy continuity and how it is evolutionarily necessary. This sort of stability allows us to enjoy a movie without being confused by the changes between actors.
The reason that stunt doubles look the same on screen is that our brain likes continuity. We have a tendency to see one face as the same in sequential moments. It is for this reason that we can perceive a face of a friend in the shadow of a tree as the same friend when they walk out into the sunlight. This is actually a survival mechanism; if we did not have this ability, our visual perceptions would be bathed in chaos. The continuity enabled by our facial recognition systems facilitates social adaptability and eliminates confusion. One study supporting this finding had subjects find the exact match to a “target face” by identifying faces on a screen. Instead of pointing out the exact match, the subjects identified the match to the target face as the composite face consisting of the faces they viewed over the past few seconds. This illustrates our ability to identify different forms or views of one face as the same, favoring visual continuity and fluidity.
-Jackie Rocheleau
Sources:
Role of Fusiform Gyrus & Superior Temporal Sulcus in Face Perception & Recognition – Japanese Psychological Research
How Do We Recognize Faces? – Psych Central
Why We Can’t Tell a Hollywood Heartthrob from His Stunt Double – UC Berkeley
