Acquired prosopagnosia is a rare disorder, but it serves as a model for impairments in expert-level visual processing. This review discusses five key observations made over the past 30 years. First, there are variants, an apperceptive type linked to damage to the inferior occipitotemporal cortex and an amnestic type associated with anterior temporal lesions, both either right or bilateral. Second, these variants are clustered in syndromes with other perceptual deficits, the apperceptive type with field defects, dyschromatopsia and topographagnosia, and the amnestic type with topographagnosia and the auditory disorders of phonagnosia and acquired amusia. Third, extensive testing often shows additional problems with recognizing exemplars of other objects, especially when degrees of expertise are taken into account. Fourth, the prosopagnosic impairment does not affect all facial information. For example, the perception of expression and lip-reading likely depends on other neural substrates than those for processing facial identity. Last, face perception in prosopagnosia is not immutable but can improve with extensive training, though as yet this does not represent a cure for the condition. Continuing work with neural networks and animal models will enhance our understanding of this intriguing condition and what it tells us about how our brains process vision.

Determining objective measures for proof of consciousness in non-human animals has been helped by improved understanding of neural correlates of human consciousness. Functional imaging and neuropsychological studies have shown remarkable overlap between structures involved in actual perception of social and non-social objects and those involved in forming mental images of them. One area of particular interest is individual face recognition. This involves regions of the temporal lobe that are mainly only activated by actual perception or mental imagery of faces. Using behavioural, neuroanatomical and neurophysiological approaches in sheep, we have found that they have similar specialized abilities for recognizing many individuals from their faces. They have developed the same specialized neural processing regions in the temporal lobe for aiding such recognition. Furthermore, parallel activation of other brain regions controlling behavioural and emotional responses only occurs when they are overtly interested in the individuals whose faces they perceive. Such interest might therefore equate to their becoming consciously aware of them. Preliminary experiments have indicated that sheep may form and use mental images and that the regions of the temporal lobe that respond to faces can also do so under conditions where faces are suggested but do not actually appear. Such similarities between humans and sheep in this form of social recognition make it difficult to claim that humans can form mental images of faces whereas sheep cannot. While the ability to form and use mental imagery is not in itself definitive proof of consciousness, it is an important component part.

When looking for a crime suspect, the police may ask an eyewitness to construct a visual likeness (‘facial composite’) of the perpetrator, to be distributed to the public via newspaper articles, television programmes, or social media. The dissemination of facial composites can have a major impact on police investigations. It often results in a deluge of tips and could potentially influence the memory of other eyewitnesses in the case. In this article, we review research on how to interview eyewitnesses for the optimal construction of facial composites from memory. We discuss types of composite systems and their effectiveness, including the ‘gold standard’ of measuring effectiveness. We compare the question posed to the public when a facial composite is disseminated to face-matching tasks faced by immigration officials and store clerks, but then with the added difficulty of the image being a composite of unknown resemblance to the target. We also discuss the potential danger of composites contaminating other eyewitnesses’ memory, highlighting the lessons learnt from research on unconscious transference. We pose several challenges for future researchers and practitioners. We conclude that evidence-based guidance is lacking to inform the police on whether and how to use facial composites in their investigations.

Biometric recognition technologies have become more important in the modern society due to their convenience with the recent informatization and the dissemination of network services. Among such technologies, face recognition is one of the most convenient and practical because it enables authentication from a distance without requiring any authentication operations manually. As far as we know, face recognition is susceptible to the changes in the appearance of faces due to aging, the surrounding lighting, and posture. There were a number of technical challenges that need to be resolved. Recently, remarkable progress has been made thanks to the advent of deep learning methods. In this position paper, we provide an overview of face recognition technology and introduce its related applications, including face presentation attack detection, gaze estimation, person re-identification and image data mining. We also discuss the research challenges that still need to be addressed and resolved.

Facial expression recognition impairment has been reported in Parkinson’s disease. While some authors have referred to specific emotional disabilities, others view them as secondary to executive deficits frequently described in the disease, such as working memory. The present study aims to analyze the relationship between working memory and facial expression recognition abilities in Parkinson’s disease. We observed 50 patients with Parkinson’s disease and 49 healthy controls by means of an n-back procedure with four types of stimuli: emotional facial expressions, gender, spatial locations, and non-sense syllables. Other executive and visuospatial neuropsychological tests were also administered. Results showed that Parkinson’s disease patients with high levels of disability performed worse than healthy individuals on the emotional facial expression and spatial location tasks. Moreover, spatial location task performance was correlated with executive neuropsychological scores, but emotional facial expression was not. Thus, working memory seems to be altered in Parkinson’s disease, particularly in tasks that involve the appreciation of spatial relationships in stimuli. Additionally, non-executive, facial emotional recognition difficulty seems to be present and related to disease progression. (JINS, 2014, 20, 1–10)

Recognition performance does not usually change along the lifespan, but the response criterion usually does, and in general, it changes from being conservative during youth to being liberal, in old age. The focus of the present study is to analyze the changes that take place, both in discrimination and response criterion, as a result of aging in two recognition tasks: one with neutral images, and the other with faces showing positive and negative emotional expressions. Two groups of participants performed both tasks: young (N = 21; age range, 17-33 years), older (N = 21; age range, 65-91 years). The analyses of several discrimination parameters (d′ and probability of recognition) and the response criterion yielded significant age differences. Thus, results indicated that the ability to discriminate of older participants was better than that of younger participants when having to recognize neutral images, and faces with negative emotional expressions. The response criterion of younger participants was always conservative, whereas older participants only showed liberal criteria in front of faces with emotional expressions. In relation to the neutral images, the response criterion of older participants was optimum, because it led to more hits, without increasing the false alarms. The results are partially explained by the tasks differential difficulty, and are discussed within the frame of Simulation theory.

When cognitive neuropsychologists make inferences about the functional architecture of the normal mind from selective cognitive impairments they generally assume that the effects of brain damage are local, that is, that the nondamaged components of the architecture continue to function as they did before the damage. This assumption follows from the view that the components of the functional architecture are modular, in the sense of being informationally encapsulated. In this target article it is argued that this “locality” assumption is probably not correct in general. Inferences about the functional architecture can nevertheless be made from neuropsychological data with an alternative set of assumptions, according to which human information processing is graded, distributed, and interactive. These claims are supported by three examples of neuropsychological dissociations and a comparison of the inferences obtained from these impairments with and without the locality assumption. The three dissociations are: selective impairments in knowledge of living things, disengagment of visual attention, and overt face recognition. In all three cases, the neuropsychological phenomena lead to more plausible inferences about the normal functional architecture when the locality assumption is abandoned. Also discussed are the relations between the locality assumption in neuropsychology and broader issues, including Fodor's modularity hypothesis and the choice between top-down and bottom-up research approaches.

MRI diffusion-tensor tracking (DTT) was performed in 17 high-functioning adolescents/adults with autism and 17 pairwise-matched controls. White matter pathways involved in face processing were examined due to the relevance of face perception to the social symptoms of autism, and due to known behavioral and functional imaging findings in autism. The hippocampo-fusiform (HF) and amygdalo-fusiform (AF) pathways had normal size and shape but abnormal microstructure in the autism group. The right HF had reduced across-fiber diffusivity (D-min) compared with controls, opposite to the whole-brain effect of increased D-min. In contrast, left HF, right AF, and left AF had increased D-min and increased along-fiber diffusivity (D-max), more consistent with the whole-brain effect. There was a general loss of lateralization compared with controls. The right HF D-min was markedly low in the autism subgroup with lower Benton face recognition scores, compared with the lower-Benton control subgroup, and compared with the higher-Benton autism subgroup. Similar behavioral relationships were found for performance IQ. Such results suggest an early functionally-significant pathological process in right HF consistent with small-diameter axons (with correspondingly slower neural transmission) and/or higher packing density. In left AF and HF, changes were interpreted as secondary, possibly reflecting axonal loss and/or decreased myelination. (JINS, 2008, 14, 933–946.)

We present a novel eye localization method which can be used in face recognition applications. It is based on two SVM classifiers which localize the eyes at different resolution levels exploiting the Haar wavelet representation of the images. We present an extensive analysis of its performance on images of very different public databases, showing very good results.

That the human frontal lobes are particularly vulnerable to age-related deterioration has been frequently invoked as an explanation of functional decline in aging. This “frontal aging hypothesis” is evaluated in this review by examining evidence of selectively reduced frontal lobe function in aging. The frontal aging hypothesis predicts that functions largely dependent on frontal regions would decline in aging, while functions largely independent of frontal lobes would remain relatively spared. The hypothesis further predicts that age-related brain change would selectively impact frontal regions. The literatures on working memory, visuospatial attention, face recognition, and implicit memory were reviewed as exemplars of functions dependent on prefrontal, parietal, temporal and occipitotemporal cortices, respectively, with a view to establishing mediating structures and effects of aging. Age sensitivity was seen both in functions dependent on frontal integrity as well as in functions apparently independent of frontal integrity. Further, although prefrontal areas exhibit age-related decreases in regional volume, blood flow and metabolism, nonfrontal cortical regions undergo similar declines. It is concluded that while the frontal lobes are subject to age-related changes reflected in both behavior and pathology, there is only weak and conflicting evidence that frontal regions are selectively and differentially affected by aging. It is argued that a network-based theory of cognitive aging has advantages over the localizationist approach inherent in the frontal aging hypothesis. (JINS, 2000, 6, 705–726.)