Recognizing moving faces: a psychological and neural synthesis

Information for identifying a human face can be found both in the invariant structure of features and in idiosyncratic movements and gestures. When both kinds of information are available, psychological evidence indicates that: (1) dynamic information contributes more to recognition under non-optimal viewing conditions, e.g. poor illumination, low image resolution, recognition from a distance; (2) dynamic information contributes more as a viewer's experience with the face increases; and (3) a structure-from-motion analysis can make a perceptually based contribution to face recognition. A recently proposed distributed neural system for face perception, with minor modifications, can accommodate the psychological findings with moving faces.