My research focus is on the detection and recognition of personally familiar faces. Throughout our lives, we spend a considerable amount of time looking at personally familiar individuals. As a result, the human face perception system is finely tuned to detect, recognize, and interpret personally familiar faces. Recognition of personally familiar faces is remarkably robust and flexible, whereas that of unfamiliar faces is surprisingly inefficient and error-prone. Immediate access to information about people is essential for effective social interactions. My hypothesis is that protracted “training” with personally familiar faces leads to the development of elaborated person knowledge. This knowledge facilitates recognition in a top-down fashion and aids the development of detectors for diagnostic features in visual cortex that enable detection of personally familiar faces—even with reduced attentional resources or without awareness. The face perception system can be studied in its full potential only by investigating processing of the faces the neural system is best at, in much the same way that study of the language system requires investigation of processing one’s native language.

In addition, I have a broad interest in face perception and detection of social cues conveyed by faces in general, such as direction of attention and facial expressions of emotion.

In my lab, we are currently investigating:

• The mechanisms for fast detection of personally familiar faces. Optimized detection of personally familiar faces might be based on the development of detectors for diagnostic features that might be idiosyncratic for each familiar identity. Such detectors might be present in early visual cortex.

• The neural systems that participate in retrieval of information about personally familiar individuals. Spontaneous activation of person knowledge involves a neural system that overlaps with theory of mind areas, as well as areas that are involved in retrieval of episodic and autobiographical information. In addition, the emotional response to familiar others appears to play an essential role during the process of recognition.

• Neural systems involved in recognition of social interactions and recognition of intentions associated with actions.