The amygdala is proposed to process threat-related information in non-human animals. In humans, empirical evidence from lesion studies has provided the strongest evidence for a role in emotional face recognition and social judgement. Here we use a face-in-the-crowd (FITC) task which in healthy control individuals reveals prioritised threat processing, evident in faster serial search for angry c...

Faces are visual objects that hold special significance as the icons of other minds. Previous researchers using event-related potentials (ERPs) have found that faces are uniquely associated with an increased N170/vertex positive potential (VPP) and a more sustained frontal positivity. Here, we examined the processing of faces as objects vs. faces as cues to minds by contrasting images of faces ...

Expertise in recognizing facial identity, and, in particular, sensitivity to subtle differences in the spacing among facial features, improves into adolescence. To assess the influence of experience, we tested adults and 8-year-olds with faces differing only in the spacing of facial features. Stimuli were human adult, human 8-year-old, and monkey faces. We show that adults' expertise is shaped ...

The human visual system appears to process the identity of faces separately from their emotional expression, whereas the human visual system does not appear to process emotional expression separately from identity. All current explanations of this visual processing asymmetry implicitly assume that it arises because of the organization of a specialized human face perception system. A second poss...

We trained chickens to react to an average human female face but not to an average male face (or vice versa). In a subsequent test, the animals showed preferences for faces consistent with human sexual preferences (obtained from university students). This suggests that human preferences arise from general properties of nervous systems, rather than from face-specific adaptations. We discuss this...

The N170 is an event-related potential component reported to be very sensitive to human face stimuli. This study investigated the specificity of the N170, as well as its sensitivity to inversion and task status when subjects had to categorize either human or animal faces in the context of upright and inverted natural scenes. A conspicuous N170 was recorded for both face categories. Pictures of ...