THE COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF FACE PROCESSING: AN INTRODUCTION

Abstract

Faces are extraordinarily rich sources of information. From one glance, you can determine the person’s age and sex. You know where he or she is looking. You can read mood. If the person is familiar, you know who it is. For most of us, faces are a unique class of visual stimulus: What else do we look at more often or care about more deeply? The very fact that faces have been so special to us and to our primate ancestors makes them a fascinating test case for many of the central questions in cognitive neuroscience. To what extent does visual cognition rely on domain-specific processing mechanisms? How do these specialised cognitive mechanisms arise? How autonomous are they, and how do they interact with other cognitive systems? The centrality of faces in our lives, however, poses a thorny problem for researchers. What visual stimuli can serve as adequate controls, matched for interest, biological relevance, and visual expertise? Few investigators would disagree that faces are visually special, but it’s not easy to discover exactly how and why they are unique. Not easy, but worth the effort. Exploiting the gamut of techniques from cognitive neuroscience, research on face processing is now making substantial progress. The articles in the present issue use single-unit recording, event-related potentials (ERPS), fMRI, cortical microstimulation, and behavioural testing of patients with brain damage. These studies, together with recent related studies published elsewhere, have helped us gain traction on the long-standing questions of how faces are perceived, how their processing differs from that of nonface stimuli, and how the interaction of evolutionary and experiential forces has produced a neural mechanism that still outperforms the best computer vision algorithms. Here we synopsise the main advances that have been made by the research reported in this volume.