ABSTRACT
Faces are extremely important socio-biological objects. They indicate age, sex, race and identity, emotional state, health, and they also play an important role in communication. Many other face processing tests have been used for research purposes but these are characterised mainly by being ad hoc and largely unsupported by extensive normative data. In most research on face recognition the method favoured is to present a target set and then to mix them randomly with an equal number of distractor faces. Given the perceptual/cognitive skills underlying the categorisation of faces alone, their identification and the decoding of any muscular patterns revealed by them, it is, perhaps, surprising that faces have not been more extensively employed in neuropsychological tests. The Warrington Face Recognition Test, which is a true test of recognition, is part of a two-stage memory test, the other half of which involves memory for words.
