The use of facial motion and facial form during the processing of identity

Abstract

Previous research has shown that facial motion can carry information about age, gender, emotion and, at least to some extent, identity. By combining recent computer animation techniques with psychophysical methods, we show that during the computation of identity the human face recognition system integrates both types of information: individual non-rigid facial motion and individual facial form. This has important implications for cognitive and neural models of face perception, which currently emphasize a separation between the processing of invariant aspects (facial form) and changeable aspects (facial motion) of faces.