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Can a person’s name influence their facial features?

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First names are social tags that are attached to us early in life. Previous studies have shown that an individual's facial appearance is indicative of their name. A new study explores the origins of this face-name matching effect – whether names are given based on innate facial features or whether an individual's facial appearance changes to match their name over time. Findings using both humans and machine learning algorithms show that while adults show a match between facial appearance and name, this pattern is not seen in children or in children's faces digitally aged to an adult appearance.

Zwebener othersThey investigated the possibility of a self-fulfilling prophecy effect, whereby an individual's facial appearance over time begins to resemble the social stereotype associated with their name. Image credit: Zwebner others., doi: 10.1073/pnas.2405334121.

“George Orwell famously said, 'By the time you're 50, everyone has a suitable face,'” said Reichman University researcher Yonat Zwebner and his colleagues.

“Research supports Orwell's observations and suggests that changes in facial appearance over the years may be influenced by a person's personality and behaviour.”

“Our current study aims to explicitly test developmental aspects of facial appearance by focusing on social processes by taking advantage of a recently identified effect, the face-name congruency effect. The face-name congruency effect suggests that names can be manifested in the appearance of a face.”

In the study, the authors asked 9- to 10-year-old children and adults to match people's faces with names.

The findings revealed that both children and adults correctly matched adult faces to their corresponding names at rates well above chance.

However, when it came to children's faces and names, participants were unable to make accurate associations.

In another part of the study, a large database of images of human faces was fed into the machine learning system.

The computer recognized that facial representations of adults with the same name were significantly more similar to each other than to facial representations of adults with different names.

Conversely, no significant similarities were found when comparing children with the same name to children with different names.

The researchers concluded that the similarities between people's faces and names are the result of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Facial appearance changes over time to conform to the social stereotypes associated with names.

These stereotypes can form in a variety of ways, such as when a name is associated with a famous person or because of the connotations that biblical names have.

“Our study highlights the broader importance of this surprising effect – the profound influence of social expectations,” Dr Zwebner said.

“We have demonstrated that social construction, or structuring, does in fact exist, something that has been almost impossible to verify empirically until now.”

“Social constructs are so powerful that they can affect how people look.”

“These findings may suggest the extent to which other personal factors, such as gender and ethnicity, that may be even more important than a name, may shape a person's personality as they grow up.”

of result This month is Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Yonat Zwebner others2024. Does a name shape the appearance of a face? PNAS 121 (30): e2405334121; doi: 10.1073/pnas.2405334121

Source: www.sci.news

AI can accurately determine a person’s gender from a brain scan 90% of the time

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Comparisons are difficult because men’s brains tend to be larger than women’s.

Sergiy Tryapitsyn / Alamy

Are male and female brains that different? A new way to investigate this question has led us to the conclusion that they exist, but we need artificial intelligence (AI) to tell them apart.

The question of whether we can measure differences between male and female brains has long been debated, and previous studies have yielded conflicting results.

One problem is that men’s brains tend to be slightly larger than women’s. This is likely due to the fact that men are generally larger, and some previous studies have compared the size of various small areas of the brain. Unable to adjust whole brain volume. However, no clear findings have been made so far. “When you correct for brain size, the results change quite a bit,” he says. Vinod Menon at Stanford University in California.

To tackle this problem in a different way, Menon’s team used a relatively new method called dynamic functional connectivity fMRI. This involves recording the brain activity of people lying in a functional MRI scanner and tracking changes in how activity in different areas changes in sync with each other.

The researchers designed an AI to analyze these brain scans and trained it on the results of about 1,000 young people from an existing database in the United States called the Human Connectome Project, identifying which individuals are male and which individuals. told the AI whether the person was female. In this analysis, the brain was divided into 246 different regions.

After this training process, the AI was able to differentiate between a second set of brain scan data from the same 1000 men and women with approximately 90% accuracy.

More importantly, the AI was equally effective at differentiating male and female brain scans from two different, never-before-seen brain scan datasets. Both consisted of about 200 people of similar age, ranging in age from 20 to 35, from the United States and Germany.

“What we bring to the table is a more rigorous study with replication and generalization to other samples,” Menon says. None of the people in the training or testing data were transgender.

“Replication with a completely independent sample from the Human Connectome Project gives us even more confidence in our results,” he says. Camille Williams At the University of Texas at Austin.

The next question is whether the AI will be just as accurate when tested on an additional, larger set of brain scan results. “Time will tell what results we get with other datasets,” he says Menon.

If confirmed, the findings could help us understand why some medical conditions and forms of neurodiversity, such as depression, anxiety, and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, differ by gender. No, says Menon.

“If we don’t develop these gender-specific models, we will miss important aspects of differentiating factors.” [for example]”An autistic man and a control man, and an autistic woman and a control woman,” Menon said.

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Source: www.newscientist.com