Are faces special?
For most of us, the human face is one of the most common visual stimuli experienced on a daily basis. Starting from birth, we begin to identify the faces of those around us, soon becoming an everyday occurrence not given much thought to. In the following pages, I will be discussing face perception and the cognitive functions behind it, prosopagnosia, and the question of whether faces are any different from other specialized object recognition.
Why exactly are faces important to us? Evolutionarily, faces have played a key role in survival - knowing whether an approaching face belongs to a friend or an enemy could very well be the difference between death and survival. Today, faces still remain to have a central role in human interaction. In fact, studies show faces to even have an effect on speech perception - according to the McGurk effect, there is a clear connection between what one sees and hears¹. In this study, a video is shown of someone repeatedly pronouncing a one-syllable sound, such as “ba.” After a moment, the visual is switched to an identical clip, but this time the person is saying “va.” Although the audio still remains as “ba,” the visual will confuse the subject’s brain into thinking that she actually is now hearing “va.” CITE. A third essential factor of face perception is its way of communicating social information such as physical attributes (age, gender, identity), facial expressions (mood and emotional state) and interest or attention (direction of gaze)².
In order to understand how faces are perceived, we must explore the main cognitive functions starting from basic object recognition. From the primary visual cortex, a visual stimulus is taken down the dorsal and ventral pat...
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...performance implies that the FFA does indeed play a part in all specialized object recognition, and that a decrease in recognition efficiency can be explained with the idea of competition in the FFA; the first test turned out to be more difficult for car experts because the FFA had to divide between to areas of expertise - faces and cars - while the second task proved to be much easier because the objects were processed in separate areas of the brain (faces in the FFA and watches in the LOC, as nobody was a watch expert). ¹⁴
Both of these sides clearly have some good research to support them, which is why the question of whether faces are special or not still remains. However, one thing is for sure: no matter what the true neurological compound, object and face recognition is something incredibly complex, exciting and fascinating - and thus special - in itself.
Martin, K. A. (1994). A brief history of the "feature detector". Cerebral Cortex, 4, 1-7.
The most predominant feature of the human face is eyes. When talking to a person our eyes meet there eyes; the way that people identify each other is through eyes; eyes even have the power to communicate on its own. Eliezer identified people buy there eyes and knew their emotions through their eyes. “Across the aisle, a beautiful women with dark hair and dreamy eyes. I had
While communicating with another human being, one only has to examine the other’s face in order to comprehend what is being said on a much deeper level. It is said that up to 55 percent of a message’s meaning can be derived from facial expression (Subramani, 2010). These facial manipulations allow thoughts to be expressed in ways that are often difficult to articulate verbally, with the face demonstrating “the thoughts of the mind, and the feelings of the heart” (Singla). Many expressions are said to universal, particularly those showing happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and...
Research in this field found preferential differences in an adult when their eye gaze is directed towards an object, as opposed to faces with eye gaze averted from an object, in neonates (Farroni, Csibra, Simion, & Johnson, 2002). Reid and Striano (2005) examined 4-month-old infants looking at adult faces with their eye gaze directed towards an object and averted away from an object. It was found that infants looked substantially shorter at the object that was cued by the eye gaze. They concluded that the cued object was familiar compared with the uncued object which was seen as novel and therefore attracted more attention. Reid, Striano, Kaufman, and Johnson (2004) expanded upon previous research and investigated neural activity using event related potentials to measure an infants’ reaction to direct and averted eye gaze. A positive slow wave measure was adopted and it was found that the amplitude was larger for the averted eye gaze condition compared against the direct eye gaze condition. This increase indicated that the averted eye gaze was seen as novel compared to the direct eye gaze, substantiating what had been found in previous research.
A common area of perception that many may not think about is the ability to recognize faces. Facial recognition, however, is not consistent from infancy to adulthood but develops throughout an individual’s life. During infancy, the ability to see detail is quite poor compared to the average adult (Goldstein & Brockmole, 2017). When objects are within close distances, studies have shown that infants are able to perceive and detect a few features of the object; this idea can then be related to facial recognition in infants (Goldstein & Brockmole, 2017). The details that infants are able to perceive are associated with contrast in light, especially the difference between dark and light areas. Though this does
Gamer, M., Schmitz, A. K., Tittgemeyer, M., & Schilbach, L. (2013). The human amygdala drives reflexive orienting towards facial features. Current Biology, 23(20), R917-R918. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2013.09.008
This face of the other, the stranger serves as an “indicative surface” to us. Lingis (1994) states “The face of another is a surface upon which one senses directions and directives that order me; w...
Sajda P. & Finkle, L.H. (1995) Intermediate Visual Representations and the Construction of Surface Perception. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 7, 267-291.
[21] Shah, N.J., Marshall, J.C., Zafiris, O., Schwab, A., Zilles, K., Markowitsch, H.J., Fink, G.R., 2001. The neural correlates of person familiarity: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study with clinical implications. Brain 124, 804–815.
McKone, E., Kanwisher, N. & Duchaine, B. C. (2007). Can generic expertise explain special processing for faces?. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol 11, pp.8-15.
Visual awareness in humans can affect social interaction and knowledge formation. It has always been thought that adults possess better vision than children. In the past it was thought that babies were born without vision and gained it gradually. Most of these perceptions have so far been nullified by modern research. Although the above is untrue, there are still several differences between infants’ and adults’ vision. The eye of the infant is less than half the size of an adult’s. Considering that visual ability is related to eye size, in infan...
S.A. Clark, T. A. (1988). Receptive fields in the body-surface map in adult cortex defined by temporally correlated inputs. Nature, 332.
“Do not judge the book by its cover”. This is a very famous quote. But is really personal appearance not essential? (Elmer, n.d.).
There are many different Visual Perception principles in perception. The main principles are Gestalt. Gestalt is a German word meaning 'form' or 'shape'. Gestalt psychologists formulated a series of principles that describe how t...
Perception is a mysterious thing; it faces a lot of misconception, for it can merely be described as a lens, as it decides how someone views the events happening around them. Perception is the definition of how someone decides to use their senses to observe and make conceptions about events or conditions they see or that are around them. Perception also represents how people choose to observe regardless if it’s in a negative or positive way. In other words, perception can be described as people's cognitive function of how they interpret abstract situations or conjunctures around them. All in all, perception can do three things for someone: perception can change the way someone thinks in terms of their emotions and motivations, perception acts