Face recognition's practical relevance: Social bonds, not social butterflies.

ABSTRACT: Research on individual differences in face recognition has provided important foundational insights: their broad range, cognitive specificity, strong heritability, and resilience to change. Elusive, however, has been the key issue of practical relevance: do these individual differences correlate with aspects of life that go beyond the recognition of faces, per se? Though often assumed, especially in social realms, such correlates remain largely theoretical, without empirical support. Here, we investigate an array of potential social correlates of face recognition. We establish social relationship quality as a reproducible correlate. This link generalises across face recognition tasks and across independent samples. In contrast, we detect no robust association with the sheer quantity of soc

SUBMITTER: Engfors LM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11445692 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature