The Person Perception Lab at Dartmouth College is led by Dr. M. Ida Gobbini. Our research focuses on the detection and recognition of personally familiar faces and the subsequent activation of elaborated person knowledge.

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“…Even the simple act which we describe as “seeing someone we know” is to some extent an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the person we see with all the notions we have already formed about him, and in the total picture of him, which we compose in our minds those notions have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice as if it were no more than a transparent envelope, that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is these notions which we recognize and to which we listen….”

-Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time