The Many Faces of Face Pereption
Allison B. Sekuler
McMaster University

Faces are one of the most important stimuli in our environments: they help us recognize friends, avoid foes, and interpret emotion from both. Despite their general importance for guiding our social interactions, we understand relatively little about the mechanisms underlying face perception. Although it has been widely assumed that specialized, holistic processes are critical for the processing of upright faces, recent research from our lab and others challenges that long-standing notion. I will discuss a series of behavioural and electrophysiological results from both younger and older observers that highlight the importance of an individual differences approach, and the critical roles of facial orientation structure and of experience, learning, and context in face processing and recognition.