ABSTRACT
In the 25 years or so that I have been studying aspects of face perception, the face has moved from being an idiosyncratic and marginal topic of investigation for the perceptual psychologist interested in pattern processing, to something of central importance for a range of psychologists interested in perception, cognition, cognitive neurosciences, and cognitive science 1 . The total number of articles which matched the search keys “face” and “perception” in the SCI/SSCI indexes for the 3-year period 1982 through 1984 was just four; for the 3-year period to the end of 1999 it was 403 2 . In this review I will highlight some of the important developments in face perception over this period of time. The face supplies a rich variety of information that is important in social interaction. Faces are the most reliable key to individual identity when a person is familiar to the observer. But even unfamiliar faces reveal a great deal about the social group to which the bearer belongs—we can, with various degrees of accuracy and precision, tell sex, age, and race from the face alone. We may also make use of information in facial accessories to derive information about the personal preferences of the bearer—e.g., facial
