In the Eye of the Beholder

This book, written to accompany an exhibition of the same title at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, in Spring 1998, will provide a non-technical introduction to the science of the human face and the psychology of face perception. The human face has many important biological roles, Eyes, ears, and mouth are the source of most of our sensory inputs, We intake air, food, and liquid through our nose and mouth; our eyes and ears are spaced to perceive distance; our jaws are built for chewing and swallowing. Socially, facesmore than any other part of the body, provide us with crucial information. A universally important locus of communication, we use our faces for speech, and to express emotions, the most widely investigated social signals. Easier to remember than names, faces are important cues for recognisingothers; we are adept at distinguising old from young, male from female, or one ethnic group from another on the basis of facial features. We use faces in identikit parades, readily identify faces from grotesque caricatures, detect family resemblances, and judege attractiveness on the basis offacial features. In fact, neurobiologists have shown that there are special areas of the brain dedicated to processing faces and that we are born imprinted with an innate understanding of facial patterns. Vicki Bruce and Andy Young explore all of these diverse aspects of the human face in their fascinating book. Each topic is illustrated using reproductions of portraits from the gallery's extensive collections, as well as state-of-the art computer-manipulated graphics. An attractive andaccessible book, this will be of interest to anyone who has ever wondered why and how faces are special, to humans generally, and to the human brain in particular.