David Ross and colleagues at Vanderbilt University,20 the reason we are able to recognise faces at all is because we have these face-learning strategies. Ross suggests that it is because we have a strong set of memories of what faces look like that we are able to identify new faces. More specifically, he suggests that faces are represented in our brains by their similarity to exemplars of previously experienced faces. In other words, we remember new faces in relation to our database of faces that we already have: How similar is this new face to old faces?
