Research group leads: Dr Mila Mileva and Dr Farid Pazhoohi

The Face Perception and Recognition Research Group investigates the cognitive, perceptual and social mechanisms underlying face and person perception. We explore crucial aspects of people’s everyday experiences such as recognising the faces of familiar identities, learning new identities, and forming first impressions when meeting someone for the first time. 

Our research aims to determine how we form stable mental representations of familiar identities and how we deal with variability across age, ethnicity, culture and emotion when recognising people who are familiar or unfamiliar to us. We also conduct research on perceptual expertise and the role of experience in shaping visual discrimination, including how everyday activities influence perceptual learning and the processing of human faces.

The more social aspects of our work focus on person perception where we explore how we form rapid social judgements from different identity cues such as someone’s face, voice, body shape and name as well as how people integrate the information from all of these sources together. We are also interested in the more practical consequences of these judgements such as mate preferences and sexual behaviour.

We use a variety of different approaches to investigate these questions such as experimental, electrophysiology (EEG), psychophysics, eye tracking, computational modelling, virtual reality as well as observational and ethological methods.