In another study, Young supported the idea that we recognize faces by processing information about the aural consideration of the face, rather than by analysing individual features. They combine for tours of the top half of one celebrity face with the bottom half of another. When the two halves will closely aligned to create a single face, participants experienced great difficulty in identifying the top half. This task became much easier when the two halves were misaligned or when the top half of was presented in isolation. This seems to suggest that the close alignment in the first condition produced a novel configurations that interfered with recognition.
Bruce and Young have put forward an influential model of this recognition. This model includes a number of different processing models that are linked in sequence and in parallel. Structural encoding, the separate stages of representation of the facial image. Expression analysis the drawing inferences about a person’s emotional state from an analysis of their facial features. Facial speech analysis is making use of visual information from the face when deciphering speech. Descriptive visual processing is the mechanism that allows for certain kind of face processing to occur without the necessity and for recognizing the identity of the person. Face recognition units of the stored structural descriptions of familiar faces. Person identity nodes provide personal details about an individual who has all the known to the observer. Name generation which includes individuals names are stored separately from their other details. The cognitive system seems to hold additional information that might be of use in face recognition. (Eg Queen in the shop)
. There has been empirical evidence to support Bruce and Young’s model that there are independent routes involved in processing facial expressions, facial speech and identification of specific individuals. What are the evidence, from clinical studies of people with neurological defects that disrupt normal perception.
Young investigators face perception in 34 ex-servicemen who had received missile wounds to the posterior regions of the brain. Some were selectively poor at familiar face recognition, whereas others only experienced difficulty in matching unfamiliar faces. Others found it difficult to decipher facial expressions accurately.
Sergant conducted a study in which healthy individuals were given similar tasks to do while undergoing a PET scan. The three different activities were found to activate slightly different locations in the brain. These findings provide compelling evidence for the independence of these three functions.
One limitation of this model is that it provides a week explanation. This model has been influential and seemed to come successfully for certain aspects of this recognition. However, some of the components in the modern had been less well explained in others. In particular, the role of the corpses system is not clearly specified
A study by Ellis et al (1975) illustrates the difficulties involved in recalling faces. Participants were shown six photographs of male faces for ten seconds and then asked them immediately to recall the face so that it could be reconstructed using photofit materials. When judges attempted to pick out the target face from the photofit reconstruction�s only an average of 12.5% identifications were correct indicating that the reconstructed faces did not closely resemble the original stimulus face. It seems that in order to describe a face we need to convert our stored mental representations of that face into words. The fact that this seems to be so difficult and so ineffective as illustrated in this study would indicate that we do store faces as wholes rather than as sets of separate features.
