Faces in Perception

Perception of Faces and Bodies

Human faces and bodies are both complex and interesting perceptual objects, and both convey important social information. Given these similarities between faces and bodies, we can ask how similar are the visual processing mechanisms used to recognize them. It has long been argued that faces are subject to dedicated and unique perceptual processes, but until recently, relatively little research ...

The Social Perception of Faces

Faces are one of the most potent social stimuli conveying information about social categories (e.g., sex, age, race), mental states (e.g., puzzled), emotional states (e.g., angry), attractiveness, and identity. People also infer a host of personality characteristics from facial appearance such as trustworthiness and competence (Todorov, Said, & Verosky, 2011), although these inferences are not ...

Perception And Representation of Faces

Figural aftereffects in the perception of faces.

We examined figural aftereffects in images of human faces, for which changes in configuration are highly discriminable. Observers either matched or rated faces before or after viewing distorted images of faces. Prior adaptation strongly biases face perception by causing the original face to appear distorted in a direction opposite to the adapting distortion. Aftereffects transferred across diff...

Serial Dependence in the Perception of Faces

From moment to moment, we perceive objects in the world as continuous despite fluctuations in their image properties due to factors like occlusion, visual noise, and eye movements. The mechanism by which the visual system accomplishes this object continuity remains elusive. Recent results have demonstrated that the perception of low-level stimulus features such as orientation and numerosity is ...