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Article Date: 06 Jul 2010 – 0:00 PDT
“From an early age on we are accustomed to the faces of other humans: a long nose, the swing of the lips or the bushy eyebrows. We learn to recognize the small differences which contribute to an individual appearance”, explains Christoph Dahl, researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics”. It is similar in monkeys. They learn to recognize the features of their fellow monkeys (so called conspecifics) and can grasp the identity of every group member quickly. “However in humans, as well as in macaque monkeys, this principle only works with individuals of the same kind”, says Dahl. Even though the recognition of conspecific faces is achieved by means of holistic processing, the separate parts such as mouth, nose and eyes as well as the facial proportions are still important. “Although we look at the eyes first our neural functions still grasp the whole picture”, Christoph Dahl describes the processing mechanisms behind the facial recognition.
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