Mechanisms of face perception.
Faces are among the most informative stimuli we ever perceive: Even a split-second glimpse of a person's face tells us his 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, recent evidence shows that macaques too have specialized neural machinery for processing faces. Here we propose a unifying hypothesis, deduced from computational, neurological, fMRI, and single-unit experiments: that what makes face processing special is that it is gated by an obligatory detection process. We clarify this idea in concrete algorithmic terms and show how it can explain a variety of phenomena associated with face processing.
Centers for Advanced Imaging and Cognitive Sciences, Bremen University, D-28334 Bremen, Germany. doris@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu
Doris Y
DY
Tsao
Margaret S
MS
Livingstone
D000818:Animals; D001931:Brain Mapping; D005145:Face; D005149:Facial Expression; D006801:Humans; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D011323:Primates / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology; D012919:Social Behavior; D013702:Temporal Lobe / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology*; D014795:Visual Pathways / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology*