Face Perception Across The Life Span

Face perception is a highly evolved visual skills in humans. This complex ability develops across the life-span, steeply rising in infancy, refining across childhood and adolescence, reaching highest levels in adulthood and declining in old age. As such, the development of face perception comprises multiple skills, including sensory (e.g., mechanisms of holistic, configural and featural perception), cognitive (e.g., memory, processing speed, attentional control), and also emotional and social (e.g., reading and interpreting facial expression) domains. Whereas our understanding of specific functional domains involved in face perception is growing, there is further pressing demand for a multidisciplinary approach toward a more integrated view, describing how face perception ability relates to and develops with other domains of sensory and cognitive functioning. In this research topic we bring together a collection of papers that provide a shot of the current state of the art of theorizing and investigating face perception from the perspective of multiple ability domains. We would like to thank all authors for their valuable contributions that advanced our understanding of face and emotion perception across development.

Face perception is a highly evolved visual skills in humans. This complex ability develops across the life-span, steeply rising in infancy, refining across childhood and adolescence, reaching highest levels in adulthood and declining in old age. As such, the development of face perception comprises multiple skills, including sensory (e.g., mechanisms of holistic, configural and featural perception), cognitive (e.g., memory, processing speed, attentional control), and also emotional and social (e.g., reading and interpreting facial expression) domains. Whereas our understanding of specific functional domains involved in face perception is growing, there is further pressing demand for a multidisciplinary approach toward a more integrated view, describing how face perception ability relates to and develops with other domains of sensory and cognitive functioning. In this research topic we bring together a collection of papers that provide a shot of the current state of the art of theorizing and investigating face perception from the perspective of multiple ability domains. We would like to thank all authors for their valuable contributions that advanced our understanding of face and emotion perception across development.

This book draws together, for the first time, the latest scientific findings from leading international researchers on how face recognition develops. It is only in recent years that methods acceptable in experimental psychology have been developed for studying this vital and unique process. While other publications have concentrated on computer modeling and of face processing and the like, this one is unique in that it looks at fundamental (and so far unanswered) questions such as: What are the roots of and reasons for our ability to recognize faces? How much of this ability is learned and how much innate? By connecting studies on face processing in infancy with those on the development of face processing, it thus bridges the gap between face processing research and visual perceptual development. Leading researchers from USA and Europe who have conducted pioneering work in these domains describe results and anticipate future inquiry, covering topics such as fundamental cognitive abilities in infancy, development of face processing from infancy to adulthood, and the effects of expertise on face recognition.

In the past 30 years, face perception has become an area of major interest within psychology. This is the most comprehensive and commanding review of the field ever published.

Human faces are unique biological structures that convey a complex variety of important social messages. Even strangers can tell things from our faces – our feelings, our locus of attention, something of what we are saying, our age, sex, and ethnic group, whether they find us attractive or approachable. Face Perception, second edition, has been thoroughly updated throughout, providing an up-to-date, integrative summary by two authors who have helped to develop and shape the field. The book begins with the foundations of face perception before considering what is known about how we see different things in faces. It concludes with a discussion of how face perception relates to wider questions involving interpersonal perception and re-examines the question of what makes faces ‘special’. The importance of integrating different research perspectives and asking critical theoretical questions is emphasised throughout, to develop a distinctive point of view of the area. Written in a clear and accessible style, this is invaluable reading for all students and researchers interested in studying face perception and social cognition.

Each of us is able to recognise the faces of many hundreds if not thousands of people known to us. We recognise faces despite seeing them in different views and with changing expressions. From these varying patterns we somehow extract the invariant characteristics of an individual’s face, and usually remember why a face seems familiar, recalling where we know the person from and what they are called. In this book, originally published in 1988, the author describes the progress which has been made by psychologists towards understanding these perceptual and cognitive processes, and points to theoretical directions which may prove important in the future. Though emphasising theory, the book also addresses practical problems of eyewitness testimony, and discusses the relationship between recognising faces, and other aspects of face processing such as perceiving expressions and lipreading. The book was aimed primarily at a research audience, but would also interest advanced undergraduate students in vision and cognition.

Face perception is the process by which the brain and mind understand and interpret the face, particularly the human face. The face is an important site for the identification of others and conveys significant social information. Probably because of the importance of its role in social interaction, psychological processes involved in face perception are known to be present from birth, to be complex, and to involve large and widely distributed areas in the brain. These parts of the brain can be damaged to cause a specific impairment in understanding faces known as prosopagnosia. This book presents the latest research in the field.

Section I: Reaction time and mental speed 1. Ageing and response times: a comparison of sequential sampling models, Roger Ratcliff, Anjali Thapar, Philip L. Smith & Gail McKoon 2. Inconsistency in response time as an indicator of cognitive ageing, David F. Hultsch, Michael A. Hunter, Stuart W. S. MacDonald & Esther Strauss 3. Ageing and the ability to ignore irrelevant information in visual search and enumeration tasks, Elizabeth A. Maylor & Derrick G. Watson 4. Individual differences and cognitive models of the mind: using the differentiation hypothesis to distinguish general and specific cognitive processes, Mike Anderson & Jeff Nelson 5. Reaction time parameters, intelligence aging and death: the West of Scotland Twenty-07 study, Ian J. Deary & Geoff Der 6. The wrong tree: time perception and time experience in the elderly, John Wearden Section II: Cognitive control and frontal lobe function 7. The chronometrics of task-set control, Stephen Monsell 8. An evaluation of the frontal lobe theory of cognitive ageing, Louise H. Phillips & Julie D. Henry 9. The gateway hypothesis of rostral prefrontal cortex (area 10) function, Paul W. Burgess, Jon S. Simons, Iroise Dumontheil & Sam J. Gilbert 10. Prefrontal cortex and Spearman's g, John Duncan Section III: Memory and age 11. On reducing age-related declines in memory and executive control, Fergus I. M. Craik 12. Working memory and ageing, Alan Baddeley, Hilary Baddeley, Dino Chincotta, Simona Luzzi & Christobel Meikle 13. The own-age effect in face recognition, Timothy J. Perfect & Helen C. Moon Section IV: Real-world cognition 14. Cognitive ethology: giving real life to attention research, Alan Kingstone, Daniel Smilek, Elina Birmingham, Dave Cameron & Walter Bischof 15. Are automated actions beyond conscious access?, Peter McLeod, Peter Sommerville & Nick Reed 16. Operator functional state: the prediction of breakdown in human performance, Robert J. Hockey