I nose you. Noses are key in facial recognition
When working out if someone's face is familiar, the first feature people look at is the nose, scientists have found.
It was thought people looked at the eyes first in order to recognize a face, but using eye tracking technology boffins have found it is actually the nose ... even if you haven't got a conk like Pinocchio.
The researchers showed subjects images of faces they had seen a few minutes prior and images of faces they had never seen. The subjects had to decide in a very short time whether they recognized each face or not.
A computer at UC San Diego 'watched' the movement of the subjects eyes and how long their eyes stayed at each location.
You can tell the photos were only of the peoples face, otherwise mens focus would have drifted south to see if they "recognized" a womans breasts.
The researchers discovered people first looked just to the left of the center of the nose and then to the center of the nose when trying to determine if a face is one they have seen recently.
These two point are all you need to see in order to establish if a face is one that you have seen before.
"Understanding how the brain works is the greatest mystery facing us in this century and that is just what we are trying to do," said Garrison Cottrell a science professor at UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering.
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