January
23, 2019 by Bob Yirka, Phys.org report
A team of
facial recognition experts from the University of New South Wales, Newcastle
University and the University of York has published a Comment piece in the
journal Royal Society Open Science challenging claims made by another
research team. In their paper, they acknowledge that the findings of a team
last year regarding the facial recognition abilities of sheep was compelling,
but they take issue with the claim that the research showed that sheep have
facial recognition abilities comparable to humans.
Humans
have very strong facial recognition skills conferring the ability to pick out
the faces of friends in a crowd with no problem, for example. Thus, it came as
quite a surprise when a team of researchers in 2017 claimed in a published
paper that sheep have facial
recognition skills that were comparable to humans. In their rebuttal, the
authors suggest that the evidence reported by the researchers was insufficient
to make such a claim and outline the reasons.
The
authors note that the sheep in the study learned to recognize just four
faces—all celebrities. The sheep were shown different pictures of the
celebrities over the course of three training sessions. Afterward, they were
shown a picture of one of
the celebrities and chose which of another set was the same person. The sheep
were able to pick the right one on average 79 percent of the time when shown
identical pictures of the celebrity,
and 66 percent of the time when shown a different picture. The authors
acknowledge the numbers showed that the sheep were recognizing the people in
the images, not just the image. But they also point out that claiming such a
finding proves skills comparable to humans is not logical.
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