Faces are among the most informative stimuli we ever perceive: Even a split-second glimpse of a person's face tells us his identity, sex, mood, age, race, and direction of attention. The specialness of face processing is acknowledged in the artificial vision community, where contests for face-recognition algorithms abound. Neurological evidence strongly implicates a dedicated machinery for face...

Faces are multi-dimensional stimuli bearing important social signals, such as gaze direction and emotion expression. To test whether perception of these two facial attributes recruits distinct cortical areas within the right hemisphere, we used single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in healthy volunteers while they performed two different tasks on the same face stimuli. In each ta...

Observers preferentially process information conveyed by the horizontal orientation band when identifying faces (Dakin and Watt, J Vis 2009; Goffaux and Dakin, Front Psychol 2010). However, ideal observer analysis reveals that such horizontal selectivity is optimal in face identification tasks (Pachai et al, Front Psychol 2013). Therefore, it remains unclear whether horizontal selectivity resul...

In this study, deformation patterns of an adult male lower face are measured and analyzed for efficient face design for android robots. We measured flow vectors for 96 points on the right half of the lower face for 16 deformation patterns, which are selected from Ekman’s action units. Namely, we measured 16 flow vector fields of facial skin flow. The flow vectors were created by placing ink mar...

Neurophysiological (W. A. Freiwald, D. Y. Tsao, & M. S. Livingstone, 2009; D. A. Leopold, I. V. Bondar, & M. A. Giese, 2006) and psychophysical (D. A. Leopold, A. J. O'Toole, T. Vetter, & V. Blanz, 2001; G. Rhodes & L. Jeffery, 2006; R. Robbins, E. McKone, & M. Edwards, 2007) evidence suggests that faces are encoded as differences from a mean or prototypical face, consistent with the conceptual...