While The Fingerprint and The Voice explored marks and instruments whose uniqueness was largely assumed rather than tested, The Face in 200 Facts turns to the feature people are most confident they can read: the human face.
Cornelis van Houte meticulously separates hard scientific data from popular mythology, examining what we actually know-and what we routinely get wrong-about facial recognition, anatomy, expressions, and forensics. From the famous experiment where unfamiliar viewers saw seven and a half different people in forty photographs of just two individuals, to the surprising error rates of passport officers, police super-recognizers, and advanced facial recognition algorithms, this book exposes the vast gap between laboratory illusions and real-world certainty.
Discover the facts behind the fiction:
Why unfamiliar face matching is a fundamentally different task than recognizing people you know.
- The truth behind common myths: from the number of muscles required to frown, to the Duchenne smile, and the golden ratio.
- How the cross-race effect develops in infancy and impacts eyewitness line-ups.
- The limits of emotion detection technology and physiological profiling.
Written with precision and intellectual rigor, each of the two hundred facts stands alone. Whether you are interested in forensic science, psychology, law, or cognitive science, The Face in 200 Facts changes how you look at the most looked-at object in human life.
Cornelis van Houte, doctor of laws, is an independent researcher.
