/wonders if (strongly colored) cartoon faces enhance recognition time - Philipp Lenssen

It's no accident, Philipp. :-) - Kevin Fox

In that case, I find it interesting that FF introduced 50x50 icons in addition to the names in the main feeds. Were you for or against that decision? Or is *who* posted each item not really that important? - Tony Ruscoe

In truth, when people use the same buddy icon on multiple services, their friends aren't recognizing the face in the icon; they're recalling the icon itself. So it makes sense to make an icon that's more unique than the high-spacial-frequency real-face pics, so it's more easily recognizable. - Kevin Fox

Tony: I have no problem with the icons in addition to names. They increase social bonding and sense of familiarity, but their usefulness is more for their expressive capabilities rather than as the primary means of identification. - Kevin Fox

That makes sense. I think it also holds true that seeing a real photo adds some credibility to your opinions. Of course, you don't really have that problem because you're known around here... ;-) - Tony Ruscoe

question for you kevin, where did you get your portrait from? - Wang Yip

Totally agree. I'm art directing the creation of an icon library for the company I work for and I am constantly reminding people that text is much faster to interpret than any visual representation that is limited to a few dozen pixels. Icons won't solve all your problems. - Jason Wehmhoener

Jonathan: Are you assuming that the user is scanning for a particular person based on recognizing the face or recalling the buddy icon? In the former, I think the faces are just too small to allow for a fast linear search (or any non-linear 'pop-out' search). In the latter, I'd agree, though it's contingent on the icon both being easily recalled by the person before the search begins, and that icon being significantly visually distinct from other icons. In either case, I think names work better, but it's exactly the kind of experiment that cognitive scientists love to run. - Kevin Fox

Wang: It's my XBox Live avatar. :-) - Kevin Fox

Jonathan, got some link for that 6x6px study? - Philipp Lenssen

You can click 'share' and direct-message the item to someone, or grab the shortened url and send it however you like. Back to the topic at hand though, I'm not disputing that you can recognize a person in a small picture, but that there's a higher bar for being able to find someone via a 'pop-out' search. Our brains perform pop-out searches for words all the time, but don't do it as often with static fields of small faces. There's also a sharp curve on facial recognition time based on how well (and in how many contexts) you know a person's face. You can recognize family and close friends an order of magnitude faster than a casual acquaintance. (Also, I don't know about 'cognitive scientist', but I did get my bachelors in cognitive science at Berkeley, and a lot of what I'm saying is from my coursework there under Stephen Palmer, Richard Ivry, and David Presti.) - Kevin Fox

@Philipp: first attempt to an answer... 6x6px by computer: http://www.isalliance.org/index... 7x10px by humans: http://web.mit.edu/bcs... - milivella

What's missing from the discussion about facial recognition is that in online contexts people often have only one picture as their basis for recognition. If you've never met the person you have only one or a handful of images with which to build a mental model of their appearance. In that context you're not looking for an icon with Sylvia's face on it. You're looking for Sylvia's icon. This means that a lot of the facial recognition skills we have don't come in to play and you're looking at the whole frame for cues. What are they wearing? What's the context? Are they outside? What's the tonal quality of the image? And you're in trouble if that person changes their buddy icon because then you have to learn it all over again. - Kevin Fox

That's interesting Kevin, and explains why I get so confused when my online friends change their icons/avatars - it takes me a while to determine "oh, that was so-and-so, they changed their icon". If I didn't have the text in many cases, I'd be completely lost. I guess that's a good argument for NOT regularly changing our icons. - Ken Gidley

A roommate of mine in college did a similar study: navigating through a hierarchy of folders to find a file while relying only on filenames was significantly faster than looking at icons. We can read words faster than we can recognize images. - DGentry