Modeling Social Perception of Faces [Social Sciences]

The face is our primary source of visual information for identifying people and reading their emotional and mental states. With the exception of prosopagnosics (who are unable to recognize faces) and those suffering from such disorders of social cognition as autism, people are extremely adept at these two tasks. However, our cognitive powers in this regard come at the price of reading too much into the human face. The face is often treated as a window into a person's true nature. Given the agreement in social perception of faces, this paper discusses that it should be possible to model this perception.