Have you ever stopped to think about how much crucial social information is conveyed by faces? Imagine what life would be like if you couldn’t recognise faces or were unable to tell that someone was upset from their facial expression.

Our ability to extract information from faces at a mere glance is essential for social interaction. Faces help us determine an individual’s identity, sex, ethnicity and attractiveness, as well as providing insights into how people are feeling and what they are attending to. Yet all faces are remarkably similar as visual patterns, so we rely on very subtle differences and variations between them to make all these judgements.

It’s not surprising that face perception has been described as our most exquisite perceptual ability! How and why are we so good at processing faces? What structures and systems in the brain support face perception? Do people differ in their ability to read faces? Are we better at processing some kinds of faces than others? Can we extract information about personality from faces? I will provide a brief introduction to research that is addressing these questions.