Abstract

In Act 1 scene iv of Macbeth, Duncan reflects that: 'There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face'. In contrast, the claim that Andy Young sets out in this book is that we are now developing a science of face perception which can indeed shed light on certain aspects of mental life. Face and Mind consists of a series of seminal research and review papers on face perception published by the author and his colleagues over the last 12 years. A comprehensive introductory chapter, written especially for this volume, serves to draw together the various themes explored in the different contributions. The book examines the question of how faces are special, in terms of their social, biological, and theoretical roles. In particular, Face and Mind seeks to determine what our understanding of the face can tell us about the human brain. It discusses the evidence for an evolved neural substrate for face perception, and the question of whether we are innately predisposed to recognise faces, to find them attractive, and to decode the many social signals they give us. The ability of the human brain to process and remember the many different faces that we see and subsequently recall is analysed. Young includes detailed studies of the types of impairment to face perception which can follow brain injury or psychiatric illness, and uses them to address these questions, as well as other issues of high intrinsic and interdisciplinary interest. These include the extent to which our mental lives result from the operation of discrete components devoted to different purposes, the differences between conscious and non-conscious processes, and how we use evidence to support our beliefs about the world. Because of the huge variety of social signals read from the face, it can offer unique theoretical and philosophical insights into these questions. This fascinating book will be of interest not only to psychologists and neuropsychologists working in the field of visual perception, but to cognitive scientists generally. It provides an excellent summary of the most important theorietical and empirical work done on face perception in recent years, and as such will be of interest to advanced undergraduate and post-graduate students in psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science.