ABSTRACT
The idea that faces might be special has considerable initial plausibility. Evolution has given neonates a special interest in faces, and there are neural areas dedicated to face recognition. This chapter argues that faces appear to be recognized using computations that are specialized for representing the variations of a shared configuration that individuate the members of a homogeneous class. It considers the nature of the computations used by the 'configural system' and its domain of operation. R. K. Yin believed that faces are unusually vulnerable to inversion because their special quality of expressiveness is lost in inverted faces. More results show that the disproportionate inversion effect is neither unique to faces nor due to the loss of expression. M. Farah offers one hypothesis about the nature of the configural system, namely that which is specialized for holistic coding. The chapter also argues that one tool in the armoury of the configural system is its ability to code subtle relational features.
