Humans Are Visual Experts at Unfamiliar Face Recognition

A recent Opinion article [ 1 Young A.W. Burton A.M. Are we face experts?. Trends Cogn. Sci. 2018; 22: 100-110 Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (125) Google Scholar ] redefines expertise at individual face recognition (IFR), claiming that typical human adults have only limited expertise with unfamiliar faces. I agree with the authors that long-term familiarity with individual faces provides a massive advantage in generalization (i.e., invariance) of recognition in behavioral tasks, but this advantage may be based on associated semantic, affective, and lexical (rather than visual) processes/representations. Compared with non-expert populations (young children, patients with prosopagnosia, other animal species), typical human adults possess a remarkable ability to readily grasp the idiosyncratic visual characteristics of an unfamiliar face.