Face perception

Holistic face processing

Face perception is one of the most demanding tasks the visual system takes on. Most faces share the same basic layout, two eyes, a nose, a mouth, yet people recognise thousands of them instantly, even as lighting, angle, and expression change. A large part of the lab's work has looked at how the brain manages this through holistic face processing, where a face is read as a whole rather than pieced together from individual features. The lab has studied how this plays out in the brain mainly through fMRI, combined with behavioural and psychophysical testing.

Congenital prosopagnosia

A central thread running through the lab's face perception research is congenital prosopagnosia, a lifelong difficulty recognising faces that isn't caused by any injury or visible damage to the brain. Studying this condition served two goals. One was simply understanding what people with prosopagnosia experience day to day. The other follows a common approach in neuroscience: looking at where a system breaks down often explains how it normally works. The lab's work pointed to disrupted spatial integration and altered connectivity across face processing regions as the likely source of the impairment, rather than damage in any single area.

Face perception across populations and conditions

The lab also looked beyond this core question, comparing how face perception differs across age groups and in autism spectrum disorder using psychophysical methods. Another line of work examined face perception in more everyday conditions, including how well people recognise faces when part of the face is covered, such as by a mask. These studies treated differences between people not as noise to filter out, but as information about how face perception actually works.