The visual perks of (not) being a wallflower: sociality is a stronger predictor of individual differences in face recognition than childhood experiences

Individuals vary considerably in their ability to recognize faces. Such variability may in part reflect individual differences in exposure to faces based on the number or diversity of faces that are available to be seen in the environment. To investigate this possibility, a series of studies have used hometown size as a proxy for individual variation in face exposure and investigated whether it predicts individual differences in face recognition ability, with mixed results. In particular, it was previously found that performance on face recognition tasks was predicted by hometown size, but only for male participants. In three experiments, we sought to revisit whether hometown size predicts face recognition ability, using an order of magnitude larger sample sizes (from N = ∼90 increased to N = ∼ 900), while also considering a variety of other predictors related to childhood experience (e.g. neighborhood type and family composition) and adult sociality, including personality, social intelligence, and shyness. Across all experiments, we found that hometown size was a poor predictor of adult face recognition ability compared to other predictors related to childhood experience. In addition, of the different measures related to sociality, social awareness was a comparatively strong predictor of individual differences in face recognition ability.