Dr. Angela Yu

University of California San Diego 

Faces: A Window into Cognition 

Face processing plays a central role in everyday life. Faces also represent a complex and rich class of stimuli that humans readily process, recognize, and make judgments on. Understanding how the brain represents and processes faces is not only important in its own right, but provides a valuable opportunity for studying how the brain selectively and efficiently implements sophisticated computational processes. In this talk, I will give an overview of our recent work modeling human face processing. We leverage sophisticated computer vision techniques to arrive at an efficient and neurally plausible representation of faces, and develop a statistical modeling framework to investigate cognitive and social aspects of human face processing.