Why we have difficulty recognising people who don’t look
like us
When Professor Will Hayward, now Head of the
School of Psychology at the University of Auckland, moved to
Hong Kong in the late 1990s he loved the city and all its
excitement but found one thing very hard to get used
to.
“It sounds un-PC but I had great difficulty telling
my Chinese students apart from one another,” he says. “I
would often mistake one student for another.”
Appointed
Head of Psychology at the University of Hong Kong, Professor
Hayward felt anxious about being unable to readily identify
his students by name until he started talking to the
students. They totally understood.
“They couldn’t
figure out why I had trouble with them; they said all white
people looked identical to each other.”
As a researcher
in visual perception, he found this intriguing and it led to
development of a research programme on face identification
for people of different ethnicities.
The science of face
perception is the topic of Professor Hayward’s inaugural
lecture, the Psychology of Seeing.
“For most of us,
seeing is effortless. We open our eyes, and the world is
instantly available to us. But the ease of the process
belies its complexity, and we are only just beginning to
understand how the brain creates our visual sense of the
world.”
Professor Hayward says the problem with faces is
that we develop expertise for the precise differences
between them but if those faces are from one ethnicity, then
we become overspecialised. This is particularly noticeable
when travelling to countries where the culture is
unfamiliar.
“The key thing is that these new people
aren’t actually more similar to each other than the ones
we are used to, but our visual system doesn’t know what to
pay attention to,” he says.
“Spending time in the new
location definitely gives you more expertise at face
identication, but it does require active practice.”
Professor Hayward’s lecture gives an overview of the
field of visual perception, which combines experimental
psychology and cognitive neuroscience. He will illustrate
how the eyes are only the beginning of the visual system,
and that major parts of the brain are devoted to
interpreting visual information.
Professor Hayward was
educated in Christchurch and studied at the University of
Canterbury before gaining his PhD from Yale University. He
led the Department of Psychology at the University of Hong
Kong before taking up his current role.
The lecture will
be held on Level 0 of the Owen G Glen Building in Lecture
Theatre OGGB3 from 6pm to 7pm. All welcome to this free
lecture. Refreshments at Excel Cafe, OGGB Level 1 from
5pm.
ends