Chapter 4 Literature Review

The human face is a very important visual stimulus in the human experiential world. It is a powerful social stimulus and is also responsible for drawing inferences about individuals we come across in our day to day lives. Information can be gained from both its static form and also its dynamic form the human face. Human faces are able to capture attention more easily than other objects (Ro, Russell & Lavie, 2001). Additionally, it is believed that facial images also facilitate subsequent processing at the locations where they occur (Axelrod, Bar & Rees, 2015). People also tend to make faster and greater accurate responses with regard to their own faces than in comparison to the faces of familiar others (Sui, Liu & Hans, 2009; Tong & Nakayama, 1999).
Human beings tend to infer about individual’s sex, race and age effortlessly and automatically from their faces ( Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000). These implications are based upon multiple features including hair, shape of face, the eyes and brows and even mouth (Brown & Perrett, 1993; Roberts & Bruce, 1988). Thus, facial features play a crucial role behind overall face perception. Another important aspect in this regard is related to memory. Memory works more in the domain of identification and recognition of human faces. Mostly all faces consist of similar features (eyes, nose and mouth) in the same configuration. Hence distinguishing among faces and recognizing them correctly becomes a very visually demanding task. Despite this we are able to identity /recognize individuals across a variety of environmental settings.
Our faces also play a key role in mate selection and interpersonal relationships. Often biases exist in terms of which face we find attractive. Attractive people are also considered as more extroverted with higher level of self-esteem and enhanced social skills (Langlois et al.,2000). Based on the above evidences, the domains of memory, social understanding, attention, perception and facial features have been incorporated in the questionnaire for face recognition.