Face Recognition
Face recognition is a crucial skill that individuals develop early in their growth and is responsible for their social abilities. Face recognition is a unique form of pattern recognition. The pattern recognition is capable of helping identify individuals and gather information from their expressions. Face recognition comes with several stages that are recognizing the face as familiar, try to figure out where we seen it before and finally putting a name to the profile. In case one fails either of the stages, then there will be a problem identifying the face. Several approaches explain face recognition. They are developmental approach and cognitive and computation approach Bruce & Young (1986)
Developmental Approach
Research done to children at different ages has shown that the skills that adults have of face perception are as a result of what they gained as infants. Under the developmental approach, the two-model theory came up based on two systems. The first said that it was the usual norm for infants or newborns to orient with faces. The second noted that the acquired specialization of the cortical circuit for other aspects of face processing. The second one happens as a result of the response to a social relevant stimulus of faces. The two-model theory in the developmental approach shows the process of face recognition and how it comes to be perfect when people are adults. Face identification develops in people due to how they orient to the faces when they are young and also external factors that may stimulate them to recognize their faces.
Cognitive and Computation Approach
The approach uses a holistic guide matching feature analysis. The features are the target, test face and structural description that consider spatial relationships and other facial features. The issue with this approach is that it does not explain private experiences. The method combines a theoretical and practical point of view. The theoretical part entails perceiving faces as a whole, and on the other hand, the actionable part involves feature by feature analysis of the face. The approach does not only apply to faces only but also other visual stimuli like objects and others (Rakova & Cahlon, 2001).
People are more equipped to recognize similar to their own than different. The effect of in groups and out groups has gone way too far in influencing how people perceive others (Rule et al., 2010). For example, the individual in the same groups based on social status, religious beliefs, political orientation and university affiliation will tend to focus more on recognizing each other than the out-groups. Such type of recognition shows that individuals in- groups are motivated to individuate a person in their groups and categorize out-groups’ members.
Every day we met new people that we are required to interact with, and therefore we must recognize them. Their faces will be the source of information to know them. With a large number of people we interact with daily, it may pose a challenge to distinguish their faces. As a result of this difficulty, neuroimaging helps investigate and represent each face with the identity of the owner. Neural mechanism of face recognition are facial discrimination and identification, recognition of facial expressions and face perception. The first mechanism is in charge of seeing and acknowledging or prejudices the person. The mechanism chooses to face process the person or not. The second mechanism is in charge of identifying what the expression on the face of a person indicates, it can be fear or confidence. The last neural mechanism is where the brain decodes the face and identifies it.
Face recognition is affected by its own -biasness. Individuals tend to recognize and acknowledge in-group members and discriminate against out-groups despite knowing them. Personal bias can be categorized in gender, race or age. Educators have the mandate to ensure they perceive parents and students differently. They should train their brains to know students’ parents at the same time recognize their students and their involvement in notable or mischievous acts. When educators are armed with information about the parents and students, it becomes easy for the brain to distinguish when it comes to dealing with parents and students. That will ensure reduced face recognition bias between educators, parents and teachers.