“I never forget a face,” Groucho Marx famously said. (“But in your case I’ll make an exception,” went the punchline.)
Groucho’s memory for faces may be legendary, but it’s really not that extraordinary. In fact, humans are quite good at recognizing faces they’ve seen before. And there’s an evolutionary reason for this.
Not only humans but also many other social animals recognize their group mates by their faces. We even have dedicated machinery in the brain for processing facial features. This makes face recognition quick and relatively accurate. But what’s really challenging is remembering the names that go with those faces.
In a recent article, psychologists Lise Abrams and Danielle Davis explored the complex reasons why we forget names. First, they consider four ways in which the names for people are different from other kinds of words:
