ABSTRACT
The concept of 'faceness' or 'face-like' is one which should cause some concern. The costs of employing an apparently dedicated neural subsystem for face perception might appear to outweigh the benefits of such specialization. A specialized system is one which may be chronically disrupted leaving the host unable to operate to the expected standards of performance. Prototypes are computed as the precise numerical mean of a sample of faces: a number of faces are captured digitally and their common facial shape extracted. When gender and distinctiveness prototypes are considered intra-class, it is possible to describe how male and female and distinctive and typical faces differ. N. L. Etcoff and J. J. Magee used facial outlines as their stimuli. It is to their credit that they succeeded in determining the categorical perception of some facial expressions using only featural and configural information. Distinctiveness is only one aspect of facial identity. Gender is the most significant semantic in constraining the search space.
