New York, Does your name resemble your face? Yes, say researchers who found out that owing to the cultural stereotypes that people associate with names, they can accurately match a stranger's name to his or her face.
"We are familiar with such a process from other stereotypes, like ethnicity and gender where sometimes the stereotypical expectations of others affect who we become, " said lead author Yonat Zwebner, doctoral student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.
"For instance, people are more likely to imagine a person named Bob to have a rounder face, than a person named Tim.
"These stereotypes can, over time, affect people's facial appearance, " Zwebner added.
Further, this might also be due to people subconsciously altering their appearance to conform to cultural norms and cues associated with their names -- like changing the areas of the face, such as hairstyle.
"Facial appearance represents social expectations of how a person with a particular name should look. In this way, a social tag may influence one's facial appearance, " explained Ruth Mayo from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
For the study, participants were shown a photograph and asked to select the given name that corresponded to the face from a list of four or five names.
The participants were significantly better -- 25 to 40 per cent accurate -- at matching the name to the face.
In another experiment, the researchers trained a computer, using a learning algorithm, to match names to faces. In this experiment, which included over 94, 000 facial images, the computer was also 54 to 64 per cent accurate.