The inversion effect, the composite face effect and the part-whole effect corroborate the notion of specific strategies in face processing as compared to the strategies adopted to process other objects.
To recognize faces, we employ different strategies that require to process different information: the shape of single facial features (i.e., featural information), the space among inner facial features (i.e., second-order configural information) and the global structure of the face (i.e., holistic information Maurer et al., 2002 Piepers and Robbins, 2012). This model suggested that face processing is divided into two different processes: face detection, which implies the capacity to perceive that a certain visual stimulus is a face, and face recognition, that is the capacity to recognize whether a face is familiar (e.g., already seen before) or not and, successively, to identify the identity of a specific face.Īs regard with functional specialization, evidence from adults’ studies has shown that faces are special and are processed in a more holistic or configural way than objects ( Tanaka and Farah, 1993 Farah et al., 1998 but see also Robbins and McKone, 2007). This distributed neural network maps, at a functional level, the cognitive model of face processing proposed by Bruce and Young (1986). The authors suggested that, to analyze all the information embedded in a face, it is necessary to postulate reciprocal interconnections between the core system and the extended system, which comprises brain structures responsible for other cognitive functions (i.e., frontal eye fields, intra-parietal sulcus, amygdala).
The core system comprises three functionally distinct regions of extrastriate cortex in both hemispheres: the inferior occipital region, which contributes to early stage of face perception, provides input both to the lateral fusiform gyrus (including the fusiform face area, FFA) for the processing of invariant characteristics of faces, and to the superior temporal sulcus (STS) for the processing of changeable aspects. This system is formed by a “core system” and an “extended system” that work in concert. Together, these findings support the hypothesis that the adult brain is equipped with a neural circuitry specialized for preferentially processing faces ( Haxby et al., 2002 Haxby and Gobbini, 2011).Īs regard with neural specialization, according to the models proposed by Haxby ( Haxby et al., 2000 Haxby and Gobbini, 2011), face processing in humans recruits a complex and distributed neural system comprised of multiple regions. Humans are expert in processing faces, and evidence from behavioral, brain lesion, and neuroimaging studies suggests that, in adults, face processing involves specific face processing strategies (i.e., functional specialization, Farah et al., 2000) carried out by dedicated brain areas (i.e., structural or neural specialization, Allison et al., 2000 Kanwisher, 2000, 2010).
Among other social cues in the environment, faces are probably the most important to us as humans, since they convey relevant social information, such as identity, age, gender, emotions. The ability to detect and to discriminate social beings from inanimate objects is of paramount importance to survive.
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