Facial Recognition

Cognitive processes involved with face recognition To human beings, facial recognition is not only essential for identification of persons in the social context, but also a vital social tool. There are various reasons why facial recognition process is a vital to human beings. Facial recognition serves an essential purpose of identifying members within our society; as a result, we are able to select those that we can socialize with that aid our survival in society. For instance, the males are able to select or identify the female and establish relationship that results to continuity of generation (Matsuo, Nakai, 1998, p. 110). While strong relationship and bonding exhibited in mother to child are facilitated by the facial recognition aspect. The other vital function played by the facial recognition function is its ability to give information about individual’s emotional status through expression aspect like a smile or gloominess which serves as a mode of communication. Therefore, due to this significance importance of the facial recognition, psychologists have shown interest in studying the cognitive processes involved in facial recognition. In this line of thought, this paper shall examine and discus the cognitive processes and systems involved in facial recognition by individuals.
Encoding of face by individual It is a common knowledge that in order for a person to recognize the face, the face features or cues must be encoded first in the long term memory. Thus, understanding face encoding precedes the recognition action. The first and initial stages of facial coding are referred to as structural encoding. In this stage, the visual information is encoded from the face into the information that shall provide information or be a data bank to face recognition systems in the stage of facial recognition. Encoding takes place in two separate processes, with the first one being “view centered description” that encodes the facial features like