Aspects of Face Processing

Faces are unique

Human brain have a specific region devoted to the recognition of human faces. This is sustained by three principal sources.

1. Faces are more easily remembered than other objects when presented in an upright orientation, and harder when inverted. This "inversion effect" is also apparent in written language and dog specialists: they are more confused by inversion than non-specialist people.
2. Prosopagnosia: the total inability to recognise previously familiar faces. Most cases involve bilateral damage to structures in the occipito-temporal region
3. Infants come into the world prewired to be attracted by faces. A study claimed that neonates prefer to look at a moving stimulus with a face-like pattern in comparison with those containing a pattern or with jumbled facial features.

Kohonen et al. (1981) makes use of distributed "neural networks" with structured interaction to achieve face recognition.

In caucasian faces, the upper face features such as hair and eyes are useful discriminators for face recognition.