Face Recognition in Human: The Roles of Featural and Configurational Processing

During the last few decades, face perception has emerged as a prevailing issue in social research. Face recognition is a fundamental and crucial skill for communicating and understanding in human society. Fortunately, most adults are able to recognize faces to identify a particular face and to discriminate among faces at a glance, begging questions of the nature of the mechanisms that underlie such face recognition. It has been established that the processing involved in face recognition likely differs qualitatively from that involved in recognizing other objects. Indeed, responses to faces are more affected by inversion than are those to non-face objects. When faces are presented upside down, it is much harder to identify them accurately. Configurational properties are disrupted by presenting visual objects upside down or by laterally offsetting the top and bottom halves of objects, and greater disruption has been found when those objects are faces than when they are other types of objects (Maurer et al., 2002). Clinical studies have provided additional evidence of the special nature of face processing. Individuals with prosopagnosia experience difficulties with discriminating among human faces. They are able to perceive a face as face, but are unable to distinguish among different persons (Banich, 2004). Their deficit is specific to faces and derives neither from problems with visual perception nor from memory impairment. Neuroimaging studies have also indicated that the neural correlates involved in face recognition are distinct from those involved in the recognition of other objects. Face processing can be divided into two types: configurational and featural (Maurer et al., 2007). Configurational processing refers to perceptions of the internal relationships among features. This approach contrasts with featural, analytic, piecemeal, or parts-based processing, which refers to perceptions of the shapes of individual features. The relative contributions of the two types of processing to face recognition and the interaction between them remain controversial. Although researchers have proposed different hypotheses about the mechanisms by which faces are processed on the basis of experimental findings, this issue is unresolved. In the context of the remarkable progress in brain imaging technology, recent studies have investigated the neural correlates of featural and configurational face processing, offering biological evidence related to behavioral phenomena. Consistent with these findings, this chapter addresses how humans recognize faces by reviewing the relevant findings from several research areas. In particular, the chapter focuses on the