Our Research

The human face is a captivating and compelling visual stimulus that provides us an entry point into our interactions with others. From the face, we can perceive a unique identity, a gender, an ethnicity/race and an approximate age. We can remember hundreds, if not thousands, of individual faces. As the face changes, it provides us with moment-to-moment emotional and social signals in the form of facial expressions and gestures. These signals guide us through social interactions and help us to form memories.

In our research, we study human perception and memory for faces , bodies, and people, using methods from experimental psychological,  computational vision, and cognitive neuroscience. The projects in our lab can be divided into categories. The first includes studies of human perception and memory for faces, bodies, and people. The second involves the study of visual representations formed by state-of-the-art face recognition algorithms, based on deep convolutional neural networks. In the third category, we are conducting studies comparing face recognition experts, untrained people, and algorithms on face identification tasks.

See all of our individual research projects.

(Left to right) Ginni Strehle, Archana Pandarangan, Connor Parde, Alice O’Toole, Gerie Jeckeln, Blake Myers, Matt Hill, Veda Gandi, Thomas Metz