Abstract

This paper examined the claim that face recognition involves a 'special' process. There are six lines of evidence that have often been cited to support this claim; (1) differential right hemisphere involvement in face recognition, (2) a clinical condition in which face recognition ability is selectively impaired by cerebral lesions (prosopagnosia), (3) neurophysiological findings, (4) innateness of face recognition ability, (5) characteristic developmental course, and (6) disproportionate inversion effect for faces. Each of the evidence has been evaluated in the light of relevant findings, but none has been found to provide strong support for the view that face recognition is special. It was thus concluded that faces are special only because we all experience them so extensively in everyday life, and are continually required to make fine discriminations among them to get essential information for appropriate social interaction with others.