This is why your brain remembers faces you see in person differently than from screens or photos

This is why your brain remembers faces you see in person differently than from screens or photos.

This is an Inside Science story. Recognizing the face of a family member or good friend is something that happens almost instantly and effortlessly. Years of exposure to loved ones' faces allow the brain to easily pick them out of a crowd, despite variables like different hairstyles or emotional expressions. But what about someone who isn't close, like a person you sat next to on the plane or a cashier at the grocery store? How does the brain do when it comes to identifying the face of a stranger? The short answer is, not very well. "With unknown faces, we are not particularly good at telling them apart," said Géza Gergely Ambrus, a postdoctoral researcher at Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany. "If you take two photos with different cameras, and the person shaved or is not wearing glasses in one of them, it is surprisingly difficult to recognize with high accuracy people we are unfamiliar with."