How good are humans at identifying faces? Amazingly good, even with only a few sparse pixels’ worth of information. Inspired by the research of Pawan Sinha, who had found that people can recognize faces using just 12 × 14 pixels’ worth of information, we wondered if people can distinguish between faces and non-faces with even less information. So, last Friday, we asked CogDaily readers to try to identify faces as small as one-quarter the size of those used in Sinha’s study: just 6 by 7 pixels. Readers rated 8 different photos in four different sizes ranging from 20 pixels wide to just 6 pixels. How’d they do?
