Humans are so good at identifying faces that we see them in places where they do not exist, such as on the moon or Mars or in combinations of circles, line segments, and dots . It is a particularly useful skill for a social animal. Yet, how exactly we recognize faces and process them is not exactly known. For instance, the Thatcher effect shows that our brains do not simply accept sensory input when deciding what a normal face looks like. Now, a new study published in the journal Cognition shows that what we think of a person influences our perception of their facial features. In other words, we think people with similar personality traits look the same. The social aspect of facial recognition Image courtesy of NYU’s Jonathan Freeman The initial study, carried out with the help of roughly 200 volunteers, had famous faces placed next to each other above a test picture of one of them. Volunteers had to then move their cursor from the test picture to the image of the same person as quickly as possible.…