Face Recognition Term Paper

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Recognition

Cognitive Process of Facial Recognition

We see so many faces each day. How does the mind keep track of them all? Something that seems so simple is actually quite complex. There are a number of cognitive processes that help the mind recognize facial features in general but also familiar faces that represent known associates. The brain categorizes and codes facial features and relationships between those features that allow for a final judgment on whom that face may belong to.

Recognizing faces is actually an incredibly complicated process. Not only does the individual have to see specific feature, but they also have to see the relationships between those features and thus classify them according to their memory bank of previously known facial structures and who they are associated with. This is known as first-order relational information, or the concept that relationships between facial features helps with identification (McKone, Crookes, & Kanwisher, 2008). However, this is not enough to recognize some of the more complicated factors that are involved with facial recognition. This is where second order relational information comes into play. This is a secondary process which uses the observance discovered in the first order relational process to compare with the typical image of a face and the familiar elements that are remembered based on prior experiences with seeing and classifying faces. Experience of seeing other faces then helps to augment the initial information recorded in the first order relational process (McKone, Crookes, & Kanwisher, 2008).

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This helps the mind recognize appropriate facial features even when they are not shown in full face form.

This then also shows that mind uses two split processes working in collaboration with each other to recognize the complex structures and features of the face. On the one hand, the mind breaks down the face into the basic features and how they are related. Yet, on the other there are other processes going on as well. Here, the research calls this "the concept of holistic / configural processing" which is understood "as a strong integration at the perceptual level of information from all regions of the face (so that altering one region leads to changes in the percept of other regions)" (McKone, Crookes, & Kanwisher, 2008). The mind also sees a generalized whole in terms of how it compares it to other known images of human faces. Also, the concept of holistic / configural processing "codes the exact spacing between face features" and "is strongly sensitive to face inversion" (McKone, Crookes, & Kanwisher, 2008). The mind uses a combination of feature relation and holistic recognition factors in order to recognize faces. As such, the mind can easily recognize when facial features are out of configuration subconsciously, which is the reason there is often such an aversion to humanoid robots or pixilated images when they….....

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