Stinky (up above) had a link to several new studies on the connection between early literacy & facial recognition, which seems to boil down to the notion that learning to read -- which really amounts to training oneself to quickly identify letter-shapes and words -- may possibly take up parts of the brain that were previously used to recognize/catalog faces.
I find that notion utterly fascinating, when you consider that the newest generations -- thanks to the internet and email and texting -- probably spend more time reading/writing standardized text/letters on a regular basis than just about any generation previous. And, too, at a much younger age, I'd expect. Makes me wonder what kind of implications that might have down the road, when it comes to how we interpret/understand faces, including the issues of ingroup/outgroup facial recognition (harking back to the "all you ___ look alike"). How might it change our ingroup/outgroup interactions if on some level we began to see all faces as unfamiliar?
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Date: 2 Dec 2010 10:27 pm (UTC)I find that notion utterly fascinating, when you consider that the newest generations -- thanks to the internet and email and texting -- probably spend more time reading/writing standardized text/letters on a regular basis than just about any generation previous. And, too, at a much younger age, I'd expect. Makes me wonder what kind of implications that might have down the road, when it comes to how we interpret/understand faces, including the issues of ingroup/outgroup facial recognition (harking back to the "all you ___ look alike"). How might it change our ingroup/outgroup interactions if on some level we began to see all faces as unfamiliar?