This book provides readers with a simplified and comprehensive account
of the cognitive and neural bases of face perception in humans. Faces
are ubiquitous in our environment and we rely on them during social
interactions. The human face processing system allows us to extract
information about the identity, gender, age, mood, race, attractiveness
and approachability of other people in about a fraction of a second,
just by glancing at their faces. By introducing readers to the most
relevant research on face recognition, this book seeks to answer the
questions: "Why are humans so fast at recognizing faces?", "Why are
humans so efficient at recognizing faces?", "Do faces represent a
particular category for the human visual system?", What makes face
perception in humans so special?, "Can our face recognition system
fail"?. This book presents the author's findings on face perception
during his research studies on both normal subjects and subjects with
prosopagnosia, a neurological disorder characterized by the inability to
recognize faces. The book describes two known forms of prosopagnosia:
acquired prosopagnosia, which is the result of a brain lesion, and
congenital prosopagnosia, which refers to a lifelong, developmental
impairment of face recognition. Written in a comprehensive and
accessible style, this book addresses both experts (cognitive
scientists, psychologists, neuroscientists and computer scientists) and
the general public, and aims at raising awareness for a debilitating
face recognition disorder, such as prosopagnosia, which is often ignored
or misdiagnosed as autism, with serious consequences for the affected
persons and their families.
