Face Recognition

Although most people are good at face recognition, we are particularly good at recognizing the faces of individuals who share our race, gender, age and species. What factors might account for this type of bias in face recognition? This collection considers the issue of how our identity influences the type of perceptual experience that we have to faces, which, in turn, influences the processes of face recognition. Leading experts from cognitive psychology, neuroscience and computer science address a wide range of topics related to the neural and computational basis of the "own versus other" effect in face recognition, the impact of early experience in infant face recognition, the effect of laboratory training to reverse the other-race effect, cultural differences in expression recognition and the forensic and social consequences of "own versus other" face recognition. The combined work gives the reader a comprehensive overview of the field and an insider's perspective on the role that identity and experience play in the everyday process of face recognition. This book was originally published as a special issue of Visual Cognition.

James Tanaka is a professor of psychology in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences program at the University of Victoria, Canada, and the associate editor of Visual Cognition. Jim received his PhD in cognitive psychology from the University of Oregon, USA, and was a post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, USA.

Introduction to Special Issue "Face recognition: The effects of race, gender, age and species" James W. Tanaka Section I: Neural and computational approaches to own- and other-race face processing 1. Neural perspectives on the other-race effect Vaidehi Natu and Alice J. O'Toole 2. Us versus them: Understanding the process of race perception with event-related brain potentials Tiffany A. Ito and Keith B. Senholzi 3. Computational perspectives on the other-race effect Alice J. O'Toole and Vaidehi Natu 4. Developing race categories in infancy via Bayesian face recognition Benjamin Balas Section II: The development of own- and other-race biases in infants, children and adults 5. Development of own- and other-race biases Gizelle Anzures, Paul C. Quinn, Olivier Pascalis, Alan M. Slater and Kang Lee 6. Perceptual expertise and the plasticity of other-race face recognition James W. Tanaka, Bonnie Heptonstall and Simen Hagen Section III: Perceptual, cognitive, affective and pragmatic perspectives on the Other Race Effect 7. The contribution of shape and surface information in the other-race face effect Caroline Michel, Bruno Rossion, Isabelle Bülthoff, William G. Hayward and Quoc C. Vuong 8. The other-race effect: Holistic coding differences and beyond William G. Hayward, Kate Crookes and Gillian Rhodes 9. Culture and the facial expressions of emotions Rachael Jack 10. Can I see your passport please? Perceptual discrimination of own- and other-race faces Kyle J. Susa, Christian A. Meissner and Amy B. Ross Section IV: Beyond race: "Own versus Other" effects in other domains 11. Sex differences and the own-gender bias in face recognition: A meta-analytic review Agneta Herlitz and Johanna Lovén 12. Aging faces in aging minds: A review on the own-age bias in face recognition Holger Wiese, Jessica Komes and Stefan R. Schweinberger 13. The own-species face bias across the lifespan Lisa S. Scott and Eswen Fava 14. Toward a synthetic model of own group biases in face memory Kurt Hugenberg, John Paul Wilson, Pirita E. See and Steven G. Young Coda Vicki Bruce