Faces are among the most informative stimuli we ever perceive: Even a split-second glimpse of a person's face tells us his identity, sex, mood, age, race, and direction of attention. The specialness of face processing is acknowledged in the artificial vision community, where contests for face-recognition algorithms abound. Neurological evidence strongly implicates a dedicated machinery for face processing in the human brain to explain the double dissociability of face- and object-recognition deficits. Furthermore, recent evidence shows that macaques too have specialized neural machinery for processing faces. Here we propose a unifying hypothesis, deduced from computational, neurological, fMRI, and single-unit experiments: that what makes face processing special is that it is gated by an obligatory detection process. We clarify this idea in concrete algorithmic terms and show how it can explain a variety of phenomena associated with face processing.

中文翻译：

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人脸感知机制。

面孔是我们所感知到的信息量最大的刺激之一：即使是对一个人脸的一瞬间瞥见，也能告诉我们他的身份、性别、情绪、年龄、种族和关注方向。人脸处理的特殊性得到了人工视觉社区的认可，那里的人脸识别算法竞争比比皆是。神经学证据强烈暗示人脑中有专门的面部处理机制来解释面部和物体识别缺陷的双重分离性。此外，最近的证据表明，猕猴也有专门处理面部的神经机制。在这里，我们提出了一个统一假设，从计算、神经学、fMRI 和单单元实验中推导出来：面部处理的特殊之处在于它受到强制性检测过程的控制。