Outline and evaluate Bruce and Young’s theory of face recognition Essay

The slip erudition moulding developed by Bruce and Young has eight key parts and it suggests how we offset familiar and unacquainted(predicate) appears, including facial structures. The diagram below shows how these parts argon interconnected. Structural encoding is where facial features and expressions are encoded. This tuition is translated at the selfsame(prenominal) time, down two incompatible pathways, to various units. One being expression synopsis, where the emotional state of the person is shown by facial features.By victimization facial livery analysis we cigaret process auditory information. This was shown by McGurk (1976) who created two video clips, one with lip movements indicating Ba and other indicating Fa. both(prenominal) clips had the sound Ba played over the clip. However, participants heard two different sounds, one heard Fa the other Ba. This suggests that visual and auditory information work as one. Other units include Face Recognition Units (FRUs) and soulfulness Identity Nodes (PINs) where our previous effledge of mettles is stored. The cognitive system contains all supererogatory information, for example it takes into account your surroundings, and who you are apt(predicate) to see there.fMRI scans through with(p) by Kanwisher et al. (1997) showed that the fusiform gyrus in the brain was more spry in face recognition than object recognition, this suggests and supports the thinker that face recognition involves a branch impact mechanism. This manikin suggests that we process familiar and unfamiliar faces differently. That we process familiar faces using geomorphologic encoding, FRUs, PINs and Name Generation. However, we practice structural encoding, expression analysis, facial speech analysis and direct visual processing to process unfamiliar faces.However, there is evidence by Young et al. suggesting that the idea of double association is poor. He studied 34 brain shamed men, finding there was only weak eviden ce for any conflict between recognising familiar and unfamiliar faces. An issue with this study and the model itself, is the use of brain damaged patients to prove it works. This is because there is only a thin sample size so it is hard to generalise to the wider population. It is also indecipherable if it is the brain injury itself that causes the result and if it isthe same for healthy multitude.There was a study done by Young, Hay, and Ellis (1985) that uses people with no medical issues. They asked people to keep a diary record of problems they experienced in face recognition. They found people never reported putting a chance upon to a face while knowing nothing else about that person. This supports the model as it suggests that we cannot think of a persons name unless we know other contextual information about them.Prosopagnosia is a condition where a person cannot secernate familiar faces, but only the features, not the building block face. The condition contradicts the model as it suggests that the process are most likely not separate. As most patients had severe problems with facial expression as well as facial identity, this suggests they are processed separately.The model can also be seen as reductionist, as it only gives a unnoticeable description of what the cognitive system does. However, there is research that does support the plan that there are two are separate paths for processing face recognition and facial expression. One being Humphreys, Avidan, and Behrmann (2007) who studied three participants with developmental prosopagnosia. All three had poor cogency to recognise faces, but their ability to recognise facial expressions was similar to that of healthy individuals.A study that suggests that units of face recognition are separate is Bruyer et al. (1983). Who investigated a patient unable to recognise familiar faces, but who could understand their facial expressions, which implies that facial expression analysis and name generation is separately processed. This supports Bruce and Youngs idea of separate units. Further support for the idea of separate components of face recognition was shown by Campbell et al. (1986). They found a prosopagnosic who could not recognise familiar faces or range their facial expressions, however they could perform speech analysis. This study suggested that facial speech analysis is a separate unit of face recognition.