Faces, people and the brain: The 45th Sir Frederic Bartlett Lecture

Abstract

The fact that the face is a source of diverse social signals allows us to use face and person perception as a model system for asking important psychological questions about how our brains are organised. A key issue concerns whether we rely primarily on some form of generic representation of the common physical source of these social signals (the face) to interpret them, or instead create multiple representations by assigning different aspects of the task to different specialist components. Variants of the specialist components hypothesis have formed the dominant theoretical perspective on face perception for more than three decades, but despite this dominance of formally and informally expressed theories, the underlying principles and extent of any division of labour remain uncertain. Here, I discuss three important sources of constraint: first, the evolved structure of the brain; second, the need to optimise responses to different everyday tasks; and third, the statistical structure of faces in the perceiver's environment. I show how these constraints interact to determine the underlying functional organisation of face and person perception.

We need to talk about super‐recognizers Invited commentary on: Ramon, M., Bobak, A. K., & White, D. Super‐recognizers: From the lab to the world and back again. British Journal of Psychology.

“…Especially, their endorsement of the importance of the laboratory to world synergy, in which practical questions act as strong tests of theory, and theories are in turn refined to cope with practical questions. We agree too that understanding the nature of laboratory and real-world tasks is crucial, as it is in almost any area of face perception research (Young, 2018). We agree too that understanding the nature of laboratory and real-world tasks is crucial, as it is in almost any area of face perception research (Young, 2018).…”

“…This approach belongs in a time-honoured tradition (Baddeley, 2018) that has been fundamental to much work on face recognition (Davies & Young, 2017). We agree too that understanding the nature of laboratory and real-world tasks is crucial, as it is in almost any area of face perception research (Young, 2018).…”

Facial and self‐report questionnaire measures capture different aspects of romantic partner preferences

“…A strength of the present research is the complementary use of ambient and averaged face‐like images to show that multiple interacting cues may contribute to partner preferences. In studies 2 and 4, ambient stimuli allowed these cues to vary naturally, facilitating the identification of the main traits involved in partner preferences, which is a theoretically powerful approach (Sutherland et al ., ; Vernon et al ., ; Young, ). In study 3, averaged images were used to emphasize the characteristics common to a specific factor.…”

“…Ambient face images represent a novel approach to examining first impressions of potential partners. Because ambient images maintain the highly variable properties that are present in natural environments, they can allow findings to be more directly generalized to real‐life contexts, relative to controlled stimuli (Sutherland, Rhodes, & Young, ; Young, ).…”

Symmetrical Viewpoint Representations in Face-Selective Regions Convey an Advantage in the Perception and Recognition of Faces

“…However, changes in viewpoint make the process of face recognition more difficult, because so many different views can be generated from the same identity. Despite this challenge, we can recognize familiar faces from different viewpoints with relative ease (Hancock et al, 2000), raising the critical theoretical question of how this viewpoint-invariance for recognizing famil-iar faces is achieved (Young and Burton, 2017;Young, 2018). Cognitive models of face processing have suggested that the recognition of facial identity is based on a view-invariant representation that receives convergent input from relatively viewpoint-specific representations (Bruce and Young, 1986; but see Tarr and Bulthoff, 1998;Burton et al, 1999).…”