Facial Identity and Expression

Scientists studying the human visual cortex believe that separate systems in the brain process facial identity and expression.

Researchers say that as your brain begins to process a given face along the face-perception neural pathways, the recognition of the person's identity and the understanding their expression appear to happen largely independently.

The neuronal structures that process facial identity recognition seem separate and remote from those that process expression. And some patients with brain impairments often have deficits in one of those abilities without the other being affected.

But the jury is still out on this question. Even though the two kinds of processing are mostly independent, there may well be a certain amount of overlap between them.

From "Face Recognition by Humans" by Pawan Sinha, Benjamin Balas, Yuri Ostrovsky, and Richard Russell

Drawing by Mort Drucker