ABSTRACT
Faces are important and complex objects. Prosopagnosia is a disorder that affects face recognition but leaves most other visual and memory functions intact. Psychological evidence suggests that there is a difference in the recognition of familiar and unfamiliar faces. Bruce and Young proposed a model of face recognition which assumed that unfamiliar faces were processed by analysing expression, facial speech and specific facial features. Burton, Bruce and Johnson have put forward an alternative interactive activation model which is able to explain how information about names can be retrieved without first accessing autobiographical information. Farah and her colleagues have proposed that, unlike many other objects, faces are perceived and recognised holistically. The theory was originally based on an analysis of different types of visual agnosia but has also gained support from studies in cognition, neuroscience and cognitive science. This approach tends to concentrate on the perceptual rather than semantic aspects of face recognition.
