Game of Thrones helps researchers gain new insights into face blindness: Study

The brain recognises faces that it comes across. Sometimes we see those faces in places where they don't even exist. The science behind it is too complex for a common personto understand. To get insights, psychologists have used the popular TV series Game of Thrones to understand everything that goes inside our brains that helps us to recognise faces.

The psychology department at the University of York conducted a new study to better understand how the brain processes and identifies faces. In a press release, the university said that the findings provide new insights into prosopagnosia or face blindness, which is a condition that impairs facial recognition and affects approximately 1 in 50 people.

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As quoted in the press release, senior author of the study, Professor Tim Andrews from the university's Department of Psychology, said: "We were really excited to see the results of our study as they suggest that our ability to recognise faces relies on what we know about people, not just what they look like."

Andrews said that the study indicates that several factors are involved for us to recognise a face, including connecting a face with knowledge about the person, their character traits, body language, our personal experiences with them and our feelings towards them.

"Facial recognition is essential for daily life and social interactions. When people struggle with this, it can significantly impact their lives and relationships, often leading to mental health issues and social anxiety," he added.

Kira Noad, who is the lead author of the study and PhD student, said in the press release, "We chose to show participants footage from Game of Thrones because the series captivated people around the world with its strong characters and their deeply nuanced personalities."

More than 70participants involved in the study had their brains examined by the researchers while they were watching clips from the Games of Thrones. Half of the participants were familiar with the show's famously complex lead characters. while the other half had never seen the series.

MRI scans revealed that when main characters appeared on screen, brain activity in neurotypical participants who knew the characters increased in areas of the brain linked to non-visual knowledge about the characters.

The researchers then repeated the same process on people with prosopagnosia in order to determine whether these regions are important for face recognition. Their inability to recognise faces is consistent with the fact that the effect of familiarity was not observed in the same brain regions as neurotypical subjects.

The study found that there was also a decrease in the connections between the visual and non-visual regions in facial blindness.

"Many previous studies on the mechanisms in the brain behind facial recognition have been done in laboratory settings with 2D static images of faces. We aimed to create a study format that was more like real life, using video to show complex scenes with multiple people," Noad said.

(With inputs from agencies)