Facial Recognition Face Recognition, Identification,

Facial Recognition

Face Recognition, Identification, and Classification Processes:

In humans, the recognition of facial characteristics that differentiate individuals from one another was profoundly important during our evolutionary development (Robinson-Riegler, 177; 181). In fact, a tremendous amount of important information is represented by facial characteristics that we perceive entirely subconsciously, such as indicators of relative health, virility, and other aspects of fitness that correspond to specific facial characteristics (Ackerman, 275).

Human recognition of inanimate objects such as houses relies primarily on first-order relational information about the way different components relate to one another. However, face recognition in humans also relies heavily on second-order relational information about the way a given face compares to a typical human face, based on our lifetime of experience with human faces (Robinson-Riegler, 178).

Human facial recognition, identification, and classification processes rely on a holistic perception, encoding, and retrieval of entire faces rather than on a perception of individual components of facial features. The fact that this is unique to whole face recognition as opposed to component facial feature recognition is evidenced by our much greater ability to recognize individual features of houses an this strongly suggests that face recognition in humans is a highly specialized mechanism devoted specifically to that singular task (Robinson-Riegler, 181).

Alternative theories maintain that face recognition is more a function of simple expertise (such as extensive experience viewing different faces). While expertise has been demonstrated to play a significant role (Robinson-Riegler, 178-179), the fact that measurable neurological responses (such as the N170 response) are involved suggests that both learned expertise and dedicated evolutionary mechanisms are equally important in human face recognition.

Concepts and Categories in Identification and Classification:

Human object recognition employs various methods for differentiating different types of things and for grouping similar things by virtue of shared apparent similarities. At the simplest level, recognition is based on superficial similarity, such as that between a tablespoon and a teaspoon. However, the similarity-based approach to recognition and categorization is incapable of accounting for fuzzy boundaries and different concepts of relative similarity (Robinson-Riegler, 191).

Other forms of similarity-based approaches such as that based on prototypical similarity and exemplars resolve only some of the deficiencies of the classical similarity-based understanding of human recognition (Robinson-Riegler, 200). The essentialist approach, for example, provides a much more comprehensive understanding of the process and roles of concepts and classifications in human recognition because it accounts for the learned context in which recognition occurs (Robinson-Riegler, 200-201).