ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes the progress made by psychologists attempting to understand the complex processes, and point to new directions which may prove fruitful in the future. It explores how the visual information from a face is extracted, how appropriate semantic information about the personal identity of its owner is retrieved, and how access of identity from a face relates to other uses made of facial information, for example in the analysis of expression. In a typical face recognition memory experiment, subjects study faces and then must select, from a larger set of faces, the face or faces which they originally studied. While many early studies of face recognition reported astonishingly high rates of facial recognition performance, in most of these tasks subjects were tested with the same photographs of the targets as those used in the study phase.
