"They all look the same to me."

[Saskwach]

On my thread about face editors [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.129254#comment_form], this post came up:

I've tried a few times, but I generally give up pretty quickly because I know the sad fact is that I could spend the rest of my life dicking around with sliders and I'd never get it to look like me.

The human brain has extremely advanced facial recognition "software," we need this because of the great variety of facial features, but this is a big problem for people trying to virtually recreate faces. It is only recently that digitally created faces became so realistic that it was actually hard to tell them from real faces. And, because of the great variety of possible facial features it is highly improbable that anyone would ever be able to realistically recreate themselves with the limited number of sliders provided.

Anyone who can realistically recreate themselves in Fallout 3 or Mass Effect or Oblivion or whatever is the exception to the rule.

It got me thinking: what facial features do people use to recognise others? And does this vary by race? In other words, is the reason that Asians/Caucasians/Africans/etc look the same to Asians/Whites/Africans/etc (choose two different and create a specific sentence) because people from that group have different prominent features that other people in that group look for more often.
The easiest I can think of is hair. Perhaps it's just my white man sensibilities coming in, but white people seem to have a greater variance in hair, at least in colour if not style. Noting this, do little white children living in little white towns grow up learning to pay attention to hair?
Do Asians/Africans, noting that hair isn't all that different amongst their own people, pay more attention to other features? Bone structure perhaps?
I was talking to a Zimbabwean at work and he noted that he and all his friends back home have no problems distinguishing white people; and it bemuses him that we Australians (one of the whitest countries you'll find) have so much difficulty with the reverse. Perhaps living in Zimbabwe means dealing with more whites than vice versa in Australia. I don't know.


PS: Any generalisations made were done either without knowledge that they were, or with knowledge but because I'd decided to cut out the exceptions for brevity's sake.