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This might have happened several times when you saw a familiar face in unfamiliar setting and you tried hard to recognize it. Scientists have found that context play an important role in identifying a face.

As a part of the study, participants were shown faces of people who were lying inside an MRI scanner. Some time later they were shown same people number of times from different angles and asked them if they recognize them or not.

Although people fairly recognized faces but scientists, through a new mathematical approach, found that people’s decision whether they recognized someone was depended on the context as well.

Two areas’ of brain activity was similar to the way which scientists’ mathematical model helped in rating people’s performance.

“Our study has characterized some of the mathematical processes that are happening in our brain as we do this,” said lead author Dr Matthew Apps in a press release. "One brain area, called the fusiform face area, seems to be involved in learning new information about faces and increasing their familiarity.

“Another area, called the superior temporal sulcus, we found to have an important role in influencing our report of whether we recognize someone’s face, regardless of whether we are actually familiar with them or not. While this seems rather counter-intuitive, it may be an important mechanism for simplifying all the information that we need to process about faces.”

“Face recognition is a fundamental social skill, but we show how error prone this process can be. To recognize someone, we become familiar with their face, by learning a little more about what it looks like,” said co-author Professor Manos Tsakiris from the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway in a press release.

“At the same time, we often see people in different contexts. The recognition biases that we measured might give us an advantage in integrating information about identity and social context, two key elements of our social world.”

The study is published in Nature Communications.