Mechanisms of face perception

Faces are among the most informative stimuli we ever perceive: Even a split-second glimpse of a person's face tells us his identity, sex, mood, age, race, and direction of attention. The specialness of face processing is acknowledged in the artificial vision community, where contests for face-r...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inAnnual review of neuroscience Vol. 31; p. 411
Main Authors Tsao, Doris Y, Livingstone, Margaret S
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States 01.01.2008
Subjects
Animals
Brain Mapping
Face
Facial Expression
Humans
Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology
Primates - anatomy & histology
Primates - physiology
Social Behavior
Temporal Lobe - anatomy & histology
Temporal Lobe - physiology
Visual Cortex - anatomy & histology
Visual Cortex - physiology
Visual Pathways - anatomy & histology
Visual Pathways - physiology
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Summary:Faces are among the most informative stimuli we ever perceive: Even a split-second glimpse of a person's face tells us his identity, sex, mood, age, race, and direction of attention. The specialness of face processing is acknowledged in the artificial vision community, where contests for face-recognition algorithms abound. Neurological evidence strongly implicates a dedicated machinery for face processing in the human brain to explain the double dissociability of face- and object-recognition deficits. Furthermore, recent evidence shows that macaques too have specialized neural machinery for processing faces. Here we propose a unifying hypothesis, deduced from computational, neurological, fMRI, and single-unit experiments: that what makes face processing special is that it is gated by an obligatory detection process. We clarify this idea in concrete algorithmic terms and show how it can explain a variety of phenomena associated with face processing.
ISSN:0147-006X
1545-4126
DOI:10.1146/annurev.neuro.30.051606.094238