Individual differences. So how much do you think different people (say, a group of your friends) vary on their ability to recognise faces? For example, how good would you say you were at recognising people you know - good? poor? average? How much variability do you think there is in the general population (that is how badly do the 'worse' performers do versus the 'best')? These are all questions that tell us things about the range of individual differences there are on face processing tasks - and it turns out the range is actually quite large! Some people are very good ('super recognisers') and some people very bad ('prosopagnosics'). We are interested in both these kinds of people, as well as the normal variation of face abilities in the general population.

Developmental and acquired prosopagnosia. After experiencing brain injury or brain trauma, some individuals lose the ability to recognise faces ('acquired prosopagnosia'), and can no longer recognise their friends, their family, or sometimes themselves. The sudden loss of this ability can be quite debilitating and shocking. Meanwhile, others are born with the inability to recognise faces ('developmental prosopagnosia'). We aim to understand more about the neural mechanisms that underlie this, as well as the extent to these difficulties are restricted to faces. If you think you might have prosopagnosia, why not look at our get involved! page?

Alexithymia. Some people are very bad at identifying and describing emotions in themselves ('alexithymia') and this can have consequences on recognising the facial expressions of others. If you think you might have alexithymia, why not look at our get involved! page?

Neurodegenerative diseases. Semantic and frontotemporal dementia, multiple sclerosis, Huntington's disease, and Parkinson's disease. If you have one of these conditions and you are interested in learning more about taking part in our research, why not look at our get involved! page?

Training. There has been quite a lot of research on how people recognises faces, as well as trying to understand what is going wrong when someone can either no longer recognise faces after brain injury ('acquired prosopagnosia') or is born with face recognition problems ('developmental prosopagnosia'). However, there have been very few attempts at improving face recognition abilities in these individuals. Further, face recognition plays an important role in security - for example, border control in which staff must be able to match a person to their passport photo, and police and security personnel who must be able to identify perpetrators. Working with a range of people, from patients, to computer scientists, to border control personnel, we work on developing face training programmes to improve face recognition abilities in people. Further, we work on developing training programmes for individuals who struggle in recognising emotional facial expression. This includes individuals with alexythymia (developmental, acquired through TBI), as well as in individuals with neurodegenerative problems.

Evolutionary face perception. The face is a primary communication tool in primates, and humans are especially sensitive to the information faces provide. It is a common belief that faces say something about us, whether that is our character, health status, or our approachability. We are interested in the kinds of social judgments we make of others and the facial cues that might be responsible for those judgments, and whether they have any validity that may confer a fitness advantage to observers.

Eyewitness testimony. If you were to witness a crime, the police may ask you to attempt to identify a suspect from a lineup (a group of images including the police suspect and a number of known-innocent "fillers"). We are interested in how well people are able to do this task, and how we can change aspects of a lineup to make identification decisions more reliable.

Behaviour. We can learn a lot from how easy or difficult people find certain computer-based tasks. These tasks tend to involve presenting different images or sounds, and measuring at how accurate and how fast people are at responding. This enables us to understand 'normal' abilities and variations in the population, and how certain factors may influence peoples' ability to recognise or process a face.

Neuropsychology. People who have brain damage as a consequence of a variety of conditions (e.g., stroke, dementia, traumatic brain injury) can develop problems on a variety of face based tasks. There is a historically rich tradition of studying people such as this (either individuals, or in small groups) because their profiles of impairment can illuminate the cognitive processes that underpin different aspects of the face processing system. Moreover, certain specific types of impairment may also provide an important means of differentiating between sub-types of a particular neurological condition (in dementia populations). If you are interested in this kind of thing then why not read this book? It is a great introduction to the wonders of the brain!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat

Computational approaches. Faces are very complex structures. To better understand them, we employ a range of computational methods that are capable of revealing information in faces and how observers respond to them, such as Principal Components Analysis, image warping and transforms, and machine learning approaches that are capable of separating features in faces that are linked to perceived characteristics.

fMRI. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a brain scanning technique that enables us to get a 'picture' of the brain and look at what areas are involved in different tasks. A typical study may involve presenting different images of faces and seeing how the response in the brain correlates with peoples' ability to recognise a face. (f)MRI can also tell us how different parts of the brain are connected - both in terms of anatomy and how they communicate when performing different tasks. We use a range of techniques, including functional and structural MRI, diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA), and functional connectivity (i.e. PPI, DCM).

EEG.