How Many People Can You Remember?

FiveThirtyEight:

Dear Joe,

First up, let me try to look at faces.

It’s generally accepted that people are better at remembering faces than names because a person’s mug is so rich with visual information (how many times have you seen someone and struggled to remember her name? how many times have you remembered someone’s name but struggled to remember what she looks like?). But studies haven’t tried to determine the exact number of faces people can remember. And to be fair, I really can’t imagine how any scientist could design an experiment that would do so reliably.

Studies have looked at what makes some faces easier to remember than others. A 1999 paper published in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review found that familiar faces (meaning faces that people had seen before) were easier to remember. That doesn’t sound too surprising, although considering the images that were used for the experiment — shown below — it’s kind of incredible that participants remembered any faces at all.

…

Maybe you’re not looking to remember people as much as you’re keen to remember their names, Joe. If so, I can offer you some advice, courtesy of Richard Harris, professor of psychology at Kansas State University. You can repeat the person’s name back to her while you’re talking to her, Harris says, “although the best strategy is simply to show more interest in the people you meet.”

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