Face recognition in everyday life
Read Face recognition in everyday life, an IELTS Reading practice passage. Remembering faces is a skill that is in daily use, but in real life we are not often called on to recognise people by their faces alone. Information about a person's identity is supplied by body build, clothes, gait, voice a…
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Remembering faces is a skill that is in daily use, but in real life we are not often called on to recognise people by their faces alone. Information about a person's identity is supplied by body build, clothes, gait, voice and the context in which the person is encountered, as well as the face. We know very little about the relative contribution of these different aspects of personal identity to the recognition process, but mistakes in, and difficulties of, identification suggest they are Important cues. Clothes and context are both liable to change, and therefore ought to be less reliable as cues, but experience suggests that we do rely on them to a considerable extent.
Vocabulary from this passage
10 words worth learning before you sit the test, each with the sentence it appears in.
- bias verb
To unfairly influence or prejudice a judgement, decision, or scientific outcome in favor of one perspective
Preexisting expectations can heavily bias the observations made by researchers during field experiments.
- comprehensive description noun
A highly detailed and complete account that encompasses all necessary features or aspects of a subject
The witness provided a comprehensive description of the suspect to help the police sketch artist.
- configural adjective
Relating to the overall arrangement, spatial relationship, or pattern of distinct components within a structural whole
Facial recognition relies heavily on configural processing rather than isolated feature analysis.
- disembodied adjective
Separated from, or existing completely independently of, a physical body or a specific real-world context
Studying disembodied facial features in a laboratory can produce misleading results about real-life recognition.
- gait noun
A person's unique manner of walking, which can serve as a distinctive physical identifier
The security system identifies individuals based on their unique gait and facial structure.
- holistic adjective
Characterized by the comprehension of the parts of something as intimately interconnected and explicable only by reference to the whole
The researchers adopted a holistic approach to analyze cognitive development in children.
- incidence noun
The frequency, rate, or relative occurrence of a particular item, error, or event within a population
The study noted a high incidence of identification errors when subjects were sleep-deprived.
- prolonged inspection noun
The act of closely examining or observing a subject over an extended period to ensure accuracy
A prolonged inspection of the historical artifact revealed subtle details previously unnoticed by experts.
- salient adjective
Most noticeable, prominent, or important within a specific context or set of data
The speaker highlighted the most salient points of the environmental policy during the conference.
- stereotype noun
A widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing
Media representations often perpetuate cultural stereotypes that do not reflect diverse real-world realities.