Perspectives on face perception. Directing research by exploiting emergent prototypes
Philip J. Benson · 2002
The concept of ‘faceness’ or ‘face-like’ is one which should cause us some concern. This is perhaps one of the most fundamental perceptions we experience when dealing with this well-known class of homogeneous objects. It is the very self-similarity between exemplars within the domain of faces which has caused a great deal of our visual system (and perhaps beyond) to appear to have specialized and thus fine-tuned itself with the apparently express intent of providing an efficient capacity to judge, discriminate and remember. That is, memory for faces must be organized in a manner sympathetic to the potential and continued circumstances of our encounters with novel instances. Not only is the storage of the markers of identity and associated qualities for a few thousand faces necessary, but also the retrieval of other specific information must be made efficient. After all, while we are consciously unaware of the levels of neural processing involved in making a particular decision about a given face, if we pause to reflect on the magnitude and complexity of the cognitive search just performed then we should be intrigued and even impressed by our capabilities.