The Science Behind ‘They All Look Alike to Me’ | Hacker News Reader

The Science Behind ‘They All Look Alike to Me’

nytimes.com

30 pointsdnetesn14 comments

Another (and much easier to discuss) symptom of the way our people identification circuitry specializes on the available samples is the disbelief when someone remarks on similarities between our siblings or to our parents. In that special case, subtle differences usually ring much stronger with us than the blatant (and useless, for identification) similarities.

This article is poorly researched and psychologists are the wrong people to ask about this phenomenon.

The region of the brain (at least chiefly) involved in facial recognition is the facial fusiform gyrus, and was named as such because of this observed role. However, it was later discovered that it does more than that: show, say, a car mechanic a small intricate car part that only an expert would recognize, and his facial fusiform gyrus will activate. Same thing with an expert bird watcher and species of birds.

It turns out that that area of the brain is used for distinguishing objects based on fine detail. As the article mentions, low exposure to other races at a young age will lead to "they all look the same", because there are certain sets of facial features that most often vary within members of a race.

Therefore, yes, it is true that it is not "racist" for members of another race to all look the same to you, the neural networks in this region of your brain may not have been trained to look for and recognize a certain set of features. The psychologists making the observations mentioned in the article are surely making correct observations, but the real reason isn't mentioned at all.

I would cite sources, but this knowledge is from my undergraduate degree in neuroscience from years ago, and I'm on mobile. I'll try to come back later and edit in some citations.

Believe it or not, some psychologists do use neuroscience. Source: I co-majored in neuroscience and psychology.

In any event, you're describing one of the root causes of the problem, but not the problem itself. It's like saying "A driver isn't responsible for making the car go forward - it's only the engine that provides the propulsion". "This bit of the brain lights up when you do X" is not the same as "Humans have this problem with X, and there are ways to get around it".

Put another way: neuroscience tells us that X happens in the brain when we see Y. Now what? This on it's own has nothing to say about something like police training.

Of course, there are entire subfields of psychology that directly and routinely engage with neuroscience. But behavioral psychology generally does not; in any case, the narrative given in the linked article speaks entirely and solely from the point of view of psychology, with no mention of neuroscience. That there are fields of psychology that fruitfully engage with neuroscience does not chance that this article does not mention neuroscientific considerations at all.

The reason that I made my comment is that the article tries to say that a deficiency in facial recognition of persons of another race is a psychological - that is, higher cognitive - effect. If it is taken as an effect of higher cognition, without a neurophysiological basis, opens up the possibility of the argument "his bias against black people made him not care enough to distinguish black people." That argument would bring open the door to arguments sociologically based biases such as being racist, when in fact there is an observed, known, studied, published, fact that the neurophysiology of the part of the brain that distinguishes faces literally cannot distinguish variations in facial features of members of a race a person hasn't been often exposed to, as a literally biological limitation that one cannot blame on sociological reasons. It has the potential to shift the conversation to a fruitless arena.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see any substantial disagreement between your comment and the article, only more technical detail.

There is no factual disagreement of the observed effect, you are correct. The particular (potentially subtle) line I was trying to draw is that there is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between biases known to psychology and biases known to neuroscience.

When an observation of a bias is made in the field of psychology, it is up in the air whether it is a bias in higher cognition or whether it is a bias that is due to a direct physiological effect. Psychology, as a whole, is a field that does not talk about neuroscience, or physiological reasons for behavior; it is a more top-down perspective. (Yes, there are subfields of psychology that try to engage with neuroscience, but they are not the norm.)

What you call "more technical detail" exactly addresses that distinction; the recognition of faces of people of another race which one has not been much exposed to can be directly correlated with a specific neurophysiological observation, not an observation of higher cognition which has no neurophysiological explanation.

It is a very important distinction, even if it seems subtle from the outside.

I imagine it thus: Human appearance is a vector space in our minds and we tend to put ourselves at the origin of the vector space. When we look at two people who look like us, the vectors that describe their appearance may be comparatively quite different because of their closeness to us. But if we look at two people of the same, different race, their appearance is quite removed from us, so the appearance-vectors that lead from us to them will be comparatively close together in direction and have comparatively similar magnitudes.

A Japanese friend of mine once told me I looked like a celebrity -- Manuel Schwarz, an Austrian model who was once married to Ayumi Hamasaki. Near as I can tell the only similarities between my appearance and his are that we are both white and we both have brown hair.

The vector space of appearances is probably pruned based on the facial features you see growing up. I doubt it's directly tied to one's facial features.

This is a good description I agree.

I think we make mental notes of differences between people. I grew up in an almost ridiculously diverse area so I marked my memory of people by a mix of characteristics: nose like so, cheekbones like so, hair like so, etc.

I didn't realize until I was much old that many of those characteristics might be typical for people from that part of the world. Groups of people from the same area cause this strategy to fail so you have to learn new "recognition identifiers".

This does not seem strange to me. My Chinese girlfriend (who is from China) tells me that caucasian people look alike.

I would really love someone to run an objective comparison of James Blake and the culprit. I know it's not popular to apologize for token racist acts, but isn't it also possible that two people just looked very similar and it was simple mistaken identity? I know I come from a place of privilege but i think there are ways to resolve these questions with simple comparative analysis.

This whole article reads like a smokescreen for what actually happened. If you look at the video - the Times has it[0], strange they didn't link it from the article - Blake was leaning up against a wall minding his own business, and was more or less rushed, grabbed and tackled by an undercover officer. He did not appear to be threatening anyone and did not appear to offer any resistance, at least none beyond what anyone would if they were suddenly attacked.

He was mistaken for an alleged participant in a credit card fraud scheme; the actual suspect ended up either not charged or acquitted. The officer in question has multiple complaints of abusive behavior on his record.

The whole thing stinks, and while Blake received apologies from the mayor and some other officials, he correctly pointed out that probably wouldn't have happened were he not James Blake. Honestly I don't understand why it matters that he might resemble the suspect, given the footage it's pretty clear that there were other ways to approach Mr. Blake without it going down like it did.

This was not a case where an NYPD officer just hadn't spend enough time around other races (...please). This was yet another example of an overaggressive cop, and for whatever reason Ms. Swarns chose to write this article comparing it to some goofball crap w/ other celebrities rather than what it is. It barely makes sense.

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/video/nyregion/100000003905322/survei...

Personally, I often confuse Jamie Fox and Samuel L. Jackson.

America coming to its senses? Hard to believe that the Nation would really bring itself to acknowledge something so simple and obvious. But I have hope.

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