Face Recognition In Cognitive Psychology

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One of the world’s most mysterious thing is how a human can perceive and interpret accurately what they see by mere milliseconds. What is recognition? Recognition is the process of recognising and determining information as “matching” or the information that has been remembered (book) (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042698901000736). Recognition is also crucial as it enables us to navigate our surroundings with incredible ease. There are two types of recognition in cognitive psychology which are face recognition and object recognition. Although both of the processes are being processed in the brain, object recognition is processed in the lateral occipital complex (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042698901000736) …show more content…

For one, when an image of an object is inverted, one can still identify the object clearly unlike face recognition where one could only identify the person in the image if the face is upright. This is because the temporal lobe in the brain cannot process the face of the person when as face recognition is dependent on distinctive relational features (http://www.psychology.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/NZJP-Vol252-1996-2-Pullan.pdf). When the texture and shading of the face are erased through negative, it makes the face harder to recognise due to “disruption of shape-from-shading or to a disruption of pigmentation, or both” (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042698999001091). Without pigmentation, textures and shading, the fusiform face area does not have the ability to process the face as face recognition needs to be processed holistically while object recognition does not process holistically so without any of the aforementioned cues it will not affect the recognition of the object. Moreover, the dimensions of the face change will affect how one perceives the face because a slight change to the face will affect the face being processed. This is because the fusiform face area is unable to process the face as even a slight change to the dimension will affect the face. Those are why the face recognition …show more content…

Object recognition does not require holistic processing which makes it less complex and then, an object is not influenced by factors such as texture, pigmentation and shading to understand and process someone’s face. An object is not affected by negative images unlike the face recognition and lastly, an object is not dependant on distinct relational features so even though the image of the object is inverted, one can still identify the image of the object. All in all, object recognition is complex but it is not as complex and complicated as face