Star Wars fans are preparing to return to a galaxy far far away this month, but even the most dedicated devotees of the series might have trouble picking out Chewbacca among a crowd of other wookiees.
A baby would probably be able to, however, as newborns have much more diverse facial recognition skills than adults. In experiments, babies could distinguish among pictures of the same monkey and two different monkeys. By the time they were nine months old, they had ‘tuned in’ to human faces and could no longer recognise individual animals from other species.
This is because we are born with a huge number of brain connections that allow us to see a range of subtle differences, and as we grow up our neural machinery is pruned to best recognise the faces we are most exposed to in early life.
These experiences are crucial: babies who were shown monkey faces for two minutes a day between six and nine months were better at telling the difference at nine months than those who never saw the monkeys again.
So while Han Solo has no problem spotting his woolly companion, it’s a bit trickier for us who have grown up on earth.
Dr Daniel Glaser is director of Science Gallery at King’s College London
