A new study from the University of Texas at Dallas suggests that facial recognition may be less important than you might think in identifying another person from a distance, even though we aren't aware of this. 

"Psychologists and computer scientists have concentrated almost exclusively on the role of the face in person recognition," lead researcher Allyson Rice of the University of Texas at Dallas, told The Almagest. "But our results show that the body can also provide important and useful identity information for person recognition." 

To test this hypothesis, the researchers conducted several experiments in which college-aged participants looked at images of two people side by side and were asked to identify whether or not the images were the same person or two different people. Some image pairs showed two different people in pictures that looked very similar, while the other image pairs showed the same person in very different images.

In some of the tests, the faces of the people in the images were ambiguous, so participants had to rely on bodies for recognition. Overall, participants were able to accurately recognize and identify a person when they saw their entire image or just their body, but when they were shown just their face, surprisingly, their accuracy dropped off. Even more surprisingly, the participants reported that they had used facial features to identify the people in the images, even though results suggested otherwise.

"This left us with a paradox," the researchers wrote. "The recognition data clearly indicated the use of body information for identification. However, the subjective ratings suggested that participants were unaware of how important the body was in their decision." 

To solve the puzzle, the researchers used eye-tracking equipment to monitor where exactly the participants were looking while trying to identify the people in the images, and found that they did spend more time looking at bodies rather than faces of subjects.

"Eye movements revealed a highly efficient and adaptive strategy for finding the most useful identity information in any given image of a person," said Rice.

The researchers believe their results could help security and law enforcement services find better ways to identify people.

The new findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.