Face Perception and Prosopagnosia: Psychophysical Investigation of Face Representation Across Changes in Viewpoint and Image Size

Face recognition is a critical skill for our social adaptation; disorders of face recognition can impose very frustrating and embarrassing problems on the affected person. Although face recognition is usually an automatic and effortless process for most of us, it entails very complex neural computations, most of which are still beyond our knowledge. This book presents review of recent scientific findings on face recognition and prosopagnosia (face-blindness) and psychophysical studies that were conducted with human observers including individuals with prosopagnosia. These studies have investigated the manner in which faces are represented in the visual system under changes in viewpoint and image size. Using unique methods including synthetic faces, the present work has extended the findings of previous studies and provided insight into the neural mechanisms that underlie face processing and prosopagnosia. Face recognition is a promising venue of scientific and clinical investigations and offers a wide range of commercial, security and law enforcement applications. The reader should be somewhat familiar with psychophysical methods.