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So a person walks up to you, says hello, asks you how you are doing. You, while politely answering her questions, are struggling hard to remember her name. You are sure you have seen her, but you just can't remember her name! This happens to most of us, many a time.

While we all wonder just why we can't recollect names of people along with their faces so many times, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis are inviting the world to take part in an online experiment that will gauge participants face-name memory in comparison to other participants of the test. Anyone around the world can take the test to participate in the study.  

The test can be taken from a computer, smartphone, iPad and other mobile devices, and is a part of a growing "crowd-sourcing" trend in science, through which massive amount of research data can be collected, using the Internet.

The test is available the website experiments.wustl.edu.

"It's a simple test that only takes about 10 minutes to complete," says research team member David Balota, PhD, professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences. "We're finding that people really seem to enjoy being tested this way."

The participants not only contribute to science, but also get to know about their own performance in the face-memory test and as to where they stand in comparison to other participants.

By keeping the test open to the world and by making it easily accessible online, the researchers hope to understand how a very diverse sampling of human population performs on a simple memory performance task, Medical Xpress reported.

Once the test is completed, the participants are provided with a rough estimate of their "Face-Name Memory IQ" score, and a comparison score with other participants. The participants can also share the test with their friends by sharing it on Facebook.

The online test has been developed by team members involving faculty, staff and students from the university's Department of Psychology in Arts & Sciences and the Department of Computer Science & Engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science.

The research team aims at exploring the usage of social media and other options to get people to take part in the test.

Balota, who recently took part in a similar international online experiment that involved the usage of iPhone for a word recognition test said, "The word-recognition study was conducted in seven languages, and, in four months, we collected as much data as a more laboratory-based version took three years to collect in a single language. At one point, it was the fifth-most downloaded word game app in the Netherlands."