How do we recognise faces?

Face perception has created serious problems for psychologists... We seem to have an amazing capacity for face recognition "I never forget a face!", and yet our ability to identify criminals in eye witness testimony has come under real attack by people like Elizabeth Loftus.

There has been a lot of research done recently which has attempted to teach computers to recognise faces. This has proved difficult The first oddity is that recognising faces is done in a different part of the brain than objects. So face recognition must be a special process. People with brain damage in this area can make some very odd judgements, such as the famous case put forward by Oliver Sachs where a man mistook his wife for a hat!!

Try out the following 'movie'...
So what's going on here?
Psychologists have been trying to work out what aspects of a face are important in Face recognition. Do we reconise 'features' in a face, like a kind of Identity Kit (brown eyes, big lips, grey hair...). Clearly features are important but experiments, like the one above, show that there must be more to it or we would see more of a problem in the initial image of David Beckham (nose right way aound, eyes upside down!!!)

So what are some of the key ideas?
The distances and 'gaps' between the features are as important as the features themselves.
Features interract!... Your big eyes, fat nose and thin mouth join together to make you as cute as you think you are!
Faces are processed holistically... move bits around, stretch them, have a hair cut or fill your lips full of fat... the overall effect may be more drastic than you think!
This is a facinating area and we have just scratched the surface here . Face recognition research can be very difficult to follow, especially some of the computer face recognition stuff but do have a look for yourselves.

Facial analysis links - complex
Some illusions - easy!


Neurotics build castles in the sky.
Psychotics live in them.
Psychiatrists collect the rent.