Face Recognition: (Special Issues of the Journal of Cognitive Psychology)

The perception and recognition of faces forms a topic which interests cognitive psychologists for a number of reasons. First, our individual abilities to recognize several hundreds (perhaps thousands) of faces demonstrates the extraordinary power and sensitivity of our visual memory system. Second, due to the uniqueness of facial appearance, the face plays the same key role as the fingerprint in forensic identification, yet we have no simple way to reveal the image of the face in the witnesses' mind. Cognitive psychologists have an important role to play in determining the most effective ways of eliciting this hidden knowledge. Third, the face mediates a wider variety of cognitive/social activities than any other kind of visual object: we recognize our friends from their faces, but also whether they look tired or sad, whether or not they are listening to us, and their lip movements help us to understand the words they speak. faces play a central role in our social recognitions and people who lose the ability to comprehend and recognize faces experience a profound effect on their social lives. The last decade has seen a rapid theoretical progress as researchers interested in face recognition began to develop the same kinds of empirical and theoretical approaches to face recognition that had already proved fruitful in the study of visual word and object recognition. Much of this development has taken place within Europe, and so it seemed particularly appropriate that a special issue of a new European journal should be devoted to this topic. The work comprises eight articles that demonstrate the methodological diversity and theoretical coherence which now characterizes the field. Following an initial theoretical overview, there are seven empirical papers reporting important new findings from several European countries. Cognitive neuropsychology and computer modelling are included as well as the more traditional perceptual and cognitive experiments.

Table of Contents:
Perceptual categories and the computation of "grandmother", A.W. Young and W. Bruce; a dissociation between the sense of familiarity and access to semantic information concerning familiar people, E.H.F de Haan et al; face recognition and lipreading in autism, B. de Gelder et al; identification of spatially quantized tachistoscopic images of faces - how many pixels does it take to carry identity?, T. Bachmann; perception and recognition of photographic quality facial caricatures - implications for the recognition of natural images, P.J. Benson and D.I Perrett; the effects of distinctiveness, presentation time and delay on face recognition, J.W. Shepherd et al; what's in a name? - access to information from people's names, T. Valentine; facenett - a connectionist model of face identification in context, S. Rousset and G. Tiberghian.