............................................................................. 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND DECLARATION............................ 4 CHAPTER 1: General Introduction................................................ 7 1.

A robust and e$cient human face detection system that can detect multiple faces in complex backgrounds is presented in this paper. The proposed system consists of two primary parts. The "rst part is to search for the potential face regions. The second part is to perform face verixcation. Our system can conquer di!erent sizes, di!erent lighting conditions, varying pose and expression, and noise ...

Upright faces are thought to be processed holistically. However, the range of views within which holistic processing occurs is unknown. Recent research by McKone (2008) suggests that holistic processing occurs for all yaw-rotated face views (i.e., full-face through to profile). Here we examined whether holistic processing occurs for pitch, as well as yaw, rotated face views. In this face recogn...

The role of symmetry detection in early visual processing and the sensitivity of biological visual systems to symmetry across a wide range of organisms suggest that symmetry can be detected by low-level visual mechanisms. However, computational and functional considerations suggest that higher-level mechanisms may also play a role in facial symmetry detection. We tested this hypothesis by exami...

Current ‘embodied simulation’ approaches to emotion perception suggest that individuals classify another person’s emotions in a three-step process: (i) observers automatically mimic a target’s facial expression, (ii) this motor activation generates the corresponding emotion in the observer, and (iii) the observer attributes his or her current emotional state to the target. In this study, we arg...

Primate face processing depends on a distributed network of interlinked face-selective areas composed of face-selective neurons. In both humans and macaques, the network is divided into a ventral stream and a dorsal stream, and the functional similarities of the areas in humans and macaques indicate they are homologous. Neural correlates for face detection, holistic processing, face space, and ...

Efforts to understand individual differences in high-level vision necessitate the development of measures that have sufficient reliability, which is generally not a concern in group studies. Holistic processing is central to research on face recognition and, more recently, to the study of individual differences in this area. However, recent work has shown that the most popular measure of holist...

Previous research has shown that facial motion can carry information about age, gender, emotion and, at least to some extent, identity. By combining recent computer animation techniques with psychophysical methods, we show that during the computation of identity the human face recognition system integrates both types of information: individual non-rigid facial motion and individual facial form....

In the leading model of face perception, facial identity and facial expressions of emotion are recognized by separate mechanisms. In this report, we provide evidence supporting the independence of these processes by documenting an individual with severely impaired recognition of facial identity yet normal recognition of facial expressions of emotion. NM, a 40-year-old prosopagnosic, showed seve...