Missing faces: Lost in ''crowding''

London, Jan 22 (UNI) Who wants to be just a face in the crowd, but don't complain if you are suffering from ''crowding''.

People suffering with the condition often fail to recognise an individual object in a cluttered environment.

Experts suggest the disorder occurs when the brain fails to make sense of the vast amount of visual information taken every second.

The result may provide a breakthrough for individuals with face-recognition disorders and visual-attention related ailments and eventually could help scientists develop an artificial visual system that approaches the sophistication of human visual perception.

Five experiments were conducted to measure participants' recognition of a familiar face or house in a crowded display of faces or houses.

In the study, it was found that face recognition became difficult when target faces were surrounded by upright faces as seen in crowds.

This effect was not present for images of houses, or when upside-down faces were used as targets, Science Daily reported.

The results indicate that searching for a face in a crowd is difficult in part because images of upright faces interfere with one another.

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