Whether Regular Visual Art Training Can Enhance People’s Face Recognition & Memory Ability
Abstract
When humans want to befriend someone, they must remember what their faces look like and try to link faces and names together. Sometimes, they may mismatch some of their friends due to the high similarity of faces. Indeed, they may not observe faces carefully so that information from faces is not deeply stored in their mind. People trained in visual art may have a stronger ability to recognize the features and structures of subjects than those who never undergo any art training. They may distinguish similar faces from the aspects common people are unaware of and accurately link faces to names in their brains. In order to explore whether regular visual art training can enhance people's face recognition & memory ability, experts and non-experts were invited to finish a self-reported questionnaire about their subjective face recognition ability, and an objective face recognition test called Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT). Through these two exams, the results found were not powerful enough to confirm the hypothesis, which meant the relation between visual art training and face recognition ability was still ambiguous.
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