Dynamic Emotional Communication View all 24 Articles. Faces that move contain rich information about facial form, such as facial features and their configuration, alongside the motion of those features. During social interactions, humans constantly decode and integrate these cues.
Share Link
1. Introduction
Facial perception is an individual's understanding and interpretation of the face. Here, perception implies the presence of consciousness and hence excludes automated facial recognition systems. Although facial recognition is found in other species [1] , this article focuses on facial perception in humans. The perception of facial features is an important part of social cognition. Developing facial recognition is a necessary building block for complex societal constructs. Being able to perceive identity, mood, age, sex, and race lets people mold the way we interact with one another, and understand our immediate surroundings. Though facial perception is mainly considered to stem from visual intake, studies have shown that even people born blind can learn face perception without vision. Theories about the processes involved in adult face perception have largely come from two sources; research on normal adult face perception and the study of impairments in face perception that are caused by brain injury or neurological illness. One of the most widely accepted theories of face perception argues that understanding faces involves several stages: [7] from basic perceptual manipulations on the sensory information to derive details about the person such as age, gender or attractiveness , to being able to recall meaningful details such as their name and any relevant past experiences of the individual.
Introduction
Try out PMC Labs and tell us what you think. Learn More. Faces are among the most informative stimuli we ever perceive: Even a split-second glimpse of a person's face tells us their 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, it has recently become clear that macaques too have specialized neural machinery for processing faces.
Thank you for visiting nature. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer. In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. Within a fraction of a second of viewing a face, we have already determined its gender, age and identity. A full understanding of this remarkable feat will require a characterization of the computational steps it entails, along with the representations extracted at each.
