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Puberty can change the way how humans recognise faces
New York : Apart from the many mental and physical changes that teenagers go through as they enter puberty, new research has found that adolescents also begin to view faces differently.
The face, which is known as the index of mind, is as unique as fingerprints and can reveal a great deal of information about our health, personality, age, and feelings.
The transition into adulthood literally changes the way people see faces — which includes showing a bias toward adult female faces as children, to preferring peer faces that match their own developmental stage in puberty.
This process is part of the social metamorphosis that prepares them to take on adult social roles, the study said.
“For the first time, the study has shown how puberty, not age, shapes humans’ ability to recognise faces as they grow into adults,” said Suzy Scherf, Assistant Professor at the Pennsylvania State University.
The findings showed that puberty shapes the subtle emergence of social behaviours that are important for adolescents’ transition to adulthood.
“This likely happens due to hormones influencing the brain and the nervous system reorganisation that occurs during this time,” Scherf added.
For the study, the researchers recruited 116 adolescents and young adults — all in the same age group — and separated them into four pubertal groups depending on their stage of puberty.
Any differences in the way they responded to faces were related to their pubertal status, not their age. The participants were presented with 120 gray-scale photographs of male and female faces.
There were images of pre-pubescent children, young adolescents in early puberty, young adolescents in later puberty, and sexually mature young adults.
Using a computerised game, the researchers then measured their face-recognition ability.
After studying 10 target faces with neutral expressions, participants were shown another set of 20 faces with happy expressions and had to identify whether they had seen each face previously or if they were new.
The results showed that the pre-pubescent children had a bias to remember adult faces, which they call the caregiver bias.
In contrast, adolescents had a bias to remember other adolescent faces, exhibiting a peer bias.
Further, among adolescents who were the same age, those who were less mature in pubertal development had better recognition memory for other similarly less mature adolescents, while those who were more mature in pubertal development had better recognition memory for peers who were similar in their level of development.
“This shows that adolescents are very clued into each other’s pubertal status. They can literally see it in each other’s faces, perhaps implicitly, and this influences how they keep track of each other,” Scherf stated.
The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, will help scientists uncover how puberty impacts the developing human brain and guide them in framing new mental health treatment.
International online casino Casino Days has published a report sharing their internal data on what types and brands of devices are used to play on the platform by users from the South Asian region.
Such aggregate data analyses allow the operator to optimise their website for the brands and models of devices people are actually using.
The insights gained through the research also help Casino Days tailor their services based on the better understanding of their clients and their needs.
Desktops and Tablets Lose the Battle vs Mobile
The primary data samples analysed by Casino Days reveal that mobile connections dominate the market in South Asia and are responsible for a whopping 96.6% of gaming sessions, while computers and tablets have negligible shares of 2.9% and 0.5% respectively.
The authors of the study point out that historically, playing online casino was exclusively done on computers, and attribute thе major shift to mobile that has unfolded over time to the wide spread of cheaper smartphones and mobile data plans in South Asia.
“Some of the reasons behind this massive difference in device type are affordability, technical advantages, as well as cheaper and more obtainable internet plans for mobiles than those for computers,” the researchers comment.
Xiaomi and Vivo Outperform Samsung, Apple Way Down in Rankings
Chinese brands Xiaomi and Vivo were used by 21.9% and 20.79% of Casino Days players from South Asia respectively, and together with the positioned in third place with a 18.1% share South Korean brand Samsung dominate the market among real money gamers in the region.
Cupertino, California-based Apple is way down in seventh with a user share of just 2.29%, overshadowed by Chinese brands Realme (11.43%), OPPO (11.23%), and OnePlus (4.07%).
Huawei is at the very bottom of the chart with a tiny share just below the single percent mark, trailing behind mobile devices by Motorola, Google, and Infinix.
The data on actual phone usage provided by Casino Days, even though limited to the gaming parts of the population of South Asia, paints a different picture from global statistics on smartphone shipments by vendors.
Apple and Samsung have been sharing the worldwide lead for over a decade, while current regional leader Xiaomi secured their third position globally just a couple of years ago.
Striking Android Dominance among South Asian Real Money Gaming Communities
The shifted market share patterns of the world’s top smartphone brands in South Asia observed by the Casino Days research paper reveal a striking dominance of Android devices at the expense of iOS-powered phones.
On the global level, Android enjoys a comfortable lead with a sizable 68.79% share which grows to nearly 79% when we look at the whole continent of Asia. The data on South Asian real money gaming communities suggests that Android’s dominance grows even higher and is north of the 90% mark.
Among the major factors behind these figures, the authors of the study point to the relative affordability of and greater availability of Android devices in the region, especially when manufactured locally in countries like India and Vietnam.
“And, with influencers and tech reviews putting emphasis on Android devices, the choice of mobile phone brand and OS becomes easy; Android has a much wider range of products and caters to the Asian online casino market in ways that Apple can’t due to technical limitations,” the researchers add.
The far better integration achieved by Google Pay compared to its counterpart Apple Pay has also played a crucial role in shaping the existing smartphone market trends.
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