> Seeing as how they didn't link to or even cite any of these studies, I think I'll reserve judgment.

Right. No refs combined with an absolutely dumb-downed and/or misinterpreted conclusion to show a whole swath of "stupid" science. As someone entering life in science (the neuro variety), this makes me pretty mad.

I looked into the Psychonomic Bulletin article and it turns out someone I'm collaborating with published in that same issue (Kahana and Howard, "Spacing and lag effects in free recall of pure lists", pp. 159-164). It's not the top psychology journal out there, but it is respectable. The article mentioned in the TFA is:

Loftus, Geoffrey R.; Harley, Erin M. "Why is it easier to identify someone close than far away?". Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, February 2005, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 43-65(23)

I wonder why the TFA author didn't choose another paper in the same issue to ridicule: "What makes working memory spans so predictive of high-level cognition?". Hmm, maybe because it sounds more intelligent and less stupidly obvious than the Loftus paper, even though it has a silly title-as-question.

The first sentence in the *abstract* of the Loftus paper is:

It is a matter of common sense that a person is easier to recognize when close than when far away.

Ok, the authors know this is common sense. Let's proceed to the second sentence:

First, the human visual system, like many image-processing devices, can be viewed as a spatial filter that passes higher spatial frequencies, expressed in terms of cycles/degree, progressively more poorly.

Ah, so their very first assumption, their starting point for the research reported in the paper, is that perceptual processing sucks for things that are far away (i.e., are smaller in the visual field and thus are characterized by high spatial frequencies). The TFA author ridiculed this as the CONCLUSION of the entire work.

In fact, if you know anything about perceptual cognition, you know that human perception of faces is a very specialized process. So the questions of WHY and HOW perceptual face recognition change with distance may be quite complicated and certainly non-obvious from the start. It's (a priori) a very different question than visual recognition of fruit or plants or car parts or random stimuli.

I don't have access to the full article, but the abstract suggests these findings: demonstrated equivalent performance at equivalent information content (that is, equating low-pass filtering and visual field extension for information) and found evidence for two distinct spatial filters in the visual system (operating at a quantified relative factor) for different perceptual tasks. The discussion relates this to possible models of face perception and real-world applications (eyewitness situations primarily, since they *quantified* where face recognition/perception becomes unreliable).

Now this is the description from TFA:

But surely we can do better than a February study in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review that concluded that it's easier to identify someone close to you than someone more than a football-field-length away. At 450 feet, the scientist concludes, "the human visual system starts to lose small details."

The Wall Street Journal has clearly taken up a strong anti-scientific stance with work like this, and I hope that it doesn't continue. It's abominable. And that was just one of the studies menti^H^H^H^H^Habused.