Face perception

Facial perception is an individual's understanding and interpretation of the face. Here, perception implies the presence of consciousness and hence excludes automated facial recognition systems. Although facial recognition is found in other species, this article focuses on facial perception in humans. The perception of facial features is an important part of social cognition. Information gathered from the face helps people understand each other's identity, what they are thinking and feeling, anticipate their actions, recognize their emotions, build connections, and communicate through body language. Developing facial recognition is a necessary building block for complex societal constructs. Being able to perceive identity, mood, age, sex, and race lets people mold the way we interact with one another, and understand our immediate surroundings. Though facial perception is mainly considered to stem from visual intake, studies have shown that even people born blind can learn face perception without vision. Studies have supported the notion of a specialized mechanism for perceiving faces. Theories about the processes involved in adult face perception have largely come from two sources; research on normal adult face perception and the study of impairments in face perception that are caused by brain injury or neurological illness. One of the most widely accepted theories of face perception argues that understanding faces involves several stages: from basic perceptual manipulations on the sensory information to derive details about the person (such as age, gender or attractiveness), to being able to recall meaningful details such as their name and any relevant past experiences of the individual. This model, developed by Vicki Bruce and Andrew Young in 1986, argues that face perception involves independent sub-processes working in unison. A "view centered description" is derived from the perceptual input. Simple physical aspects of the face are used to work out age, gender or basic facial expressions.