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Birkbeck team to run live science experiments at the Science Museum

Results will help understanding of how we read people’s faces

From Monday 16 January – Sunday 19 February 2017, a team of Birkbeck scientists will be running a live science experiment with members of the public at the Science Museum in South Kensington.

The team, which includes senior academics, post-doctoral researchers, PhD students, research assistants and student volunteers from Birkbeck’s Department of Psychological Sciences will be conducting an experiment to understand how much we read from people simply by looking at their faces. They hope to learn more about why different people like looking at different faces and why some people can remember faces better than others. The results will help psychologists to design programmes to support people who experience difficulties in identifying and reading information from a person’s face.

The team will be running the experiments in the Who am I? gallery, level 1, Wellcome Wing every day except Thursdays and Saturdays, from 10am – 5:30pm.

Dr Marie Smith, senior lecturer in Birkbeck’s Department of Psychological Sciences said: “This is a great opportunity for us to engage directly with people and discus the type of research we do and the questions that motivate us. It is also a unique chance to reach out and test a much more diverse set of people than we are conventionally able to do, with anyone aged from 5 to 105 invited to take part in our studies!”

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