Perceiving and Remembering Faces

The processes by which we recognise - or fail to recognise - another face have a perennial fascination for laymen and scientists alike. However, it is only in recent years that the problem has received systematic study by experimental psychologists. This book brings together such new information for the first time, in the form of a set of review articles, each written by a leading researcher in the field. Contributions have been grouped into those where the primary emphasis is upon theory and those where the major concern is with applied problems. Among the issues encompassed by the theory section are: face recognition in infants and children; disturbance associated with brain damage; social and racial aspects; the perception of emotion in the face and the significance of different physiognomic areas in mediating recognition. The relationship of face recognition, both to other memory processes and to information processing in general, is also extensively covered. In the applied section, areas considered include: psycho-legal aspects of identification with special reference to parades or 'line-ups'; studies of recall tools like 'Identikit' and 'Photofit'; the computerised identification and retrieval of facial images, and the effectiveness of training procedures designed to improve facial memory. Perceiving and Remembering Faces is invaluable to psychologists, whether academics working in higher education or applied practitioners such as clinical psychologists. The emphasis on practical as well as theoretical issues; however, ensures that the book is also of considerable interest to lawyers, criminologists and law enforcement specialists, or indeed to anyone whose work brings them into contact with that central enigma of all human perception and communication: the human face.