Face Recognition - Processes Associated with Face Recognition, Identification, and Classification

Face Recognition

Face perception is very complex; people are competent in gathering an incessant stream of social information, ranging from non verbal to verbal communication. For humans, faces are important in visual stimuli, a fact that becomes evident in social settings. As human we are incessantly, sometimes fixatedly, observe each other's faces, focusing on subtle factors that can provide certain insight into the, level of engagement, emotional state or even object of attention of other people. Fluency with faces proposes great social advantages. (Leopold & Rhodes, 2010). In this paper I will go over the processes associated with face recognition, identification and classification, the role of encoding and retrieval processes involved with long-term memory and how it affects face recognition. I will also identify two possible errors that can occur with face recognition.

Processes Associated with Face Recognition, Identification, and Classification

The identification of people's faces is somewhat the peak of human visual performance, since all faces comprise of the same basic build up, two eyes above a nose and mouth. Every person must be recognized by slight variations from this pattern. To process facial recognition a person needs to depend on the process of first-order relational information (Leopold & Rhodes, 2010). This is the information about the parts of an object and how those parts relate to one another (Leopold & Rhodes, 2010). For face recognition, this involves an examination of the individual's facial features and the relationship among those features (Leopold & Rhodes, 2010). However, first-order relational information is not enough to recognize faces; merely seeing that the two eyes are above the nose, which is above the mouth, may be sufficient and adequate for identifying that the object is a face but doesn't identify who the face belongs to. To identify faces, people need second-order relational information (Leopold & Rhodes, 2010). This involves contrasting the first-order analysis to facial features of a regular or conventional face (Leopold & Rhodes, 2010). When an individual deal with details, it is done in steps. One way to look at this is considering the process of acquiring, retaining, and using information as an activity which is also called information processing (Leopold & Rhodes, 2010). This process involves everything perceived by our senses. Individuals are not knowingly aware of most of the things they perceive because they only become aware when they are consciously directed to their attention. When individuals focus their attention, they are placed in their working memory (Leopold & Rhodes, 2010). Even when an individual is presented with a stimulus in suboptimal conditions, the face-processing system still has the capability of taking out the categorical knowledge in an accurate and rapid method. Third, category activation is sensitive