Why do we mix up faces? Well, a small team of researchers at Victoria University believe the show, Game of Thrones can help us find an answer.
Christel Deveue is a lecturer in Cognitive Psychology, and one of the minds behind the study about her research into facial recognition.
She says there are significant limitations in existing tests of face recognition, so a show like Game of Thrones is ideal because fans have been exposed to hundreds of characters over the years, while they aged, changed hairstyles or became disfigured.
Lena Headey in season seven of Game of Thrones. Photo: HBO
Dr Devue says she herself is very good with faces (according to the standard lab-based tests), but noticed she kept mixing up similar-looking characters while watching the show.
She explains how they used the show's characters to better understand our facial recognition abilities.
“We had two goals, one of them was to describe how we transition from being really bad with faces of people we just met, to being really good with faces of people we know really well.”
But while research so far has focused on these two extremes, no-one has really looked at the in-between - the people we know on varying scales of familiarity.
The second goal was to understand individual recognition a bit better.
“People really vary a lot with their ability to understand faces, some people are really struggling and some people are really good and find it really easy.”
The researchers thought because Game of Thrones has so many characters - the largest cast in television history - and has taken place over a long period of time, six years when the study began, it would provide a big pool to work from.
A lot of characters also die, says Deveue.
“We learnt that people aren’t so good with faces, even familiar ones. People forget faces over time and people are thrown off by simple changes in hairstyle or facial hair.”
Subjects were tested on how well they recognised characters when their appearance changed and whether or not they could spot them in a lineup of actors and random people.
Would you be able to spot Denerys in a lineup if she didn’t have her signature blonde locks?
“When the photos were different from what the actors look like in the show, people were performing much worse,” says Deveue.
People who were supposedly great with faces particularly struggled with providing information about the character, and even forgot their names.
The study found that even if a character had done atrocious things in the show if they didn’t play a big role, they were easily forgotten.
