Open research questions in Face Recognition and Perception

What the literature leaves open

• The Cogitate Consortium (2025) recently conducted a large-scale adversarial collaboration to arbitrate between GNWT and IIT; however, some of their analyses yielded mixed findings.

  Testing the Spatiotemporal Predictions of Global Neuronal Workspace Theory and Integrated Information Theory · 2026 · DOI

• Most existing methods learn mappings from fMRI responses to visual features extracted by artificial neural networks (ANNs), yet it remains unclear whether ANN-derived features provide suitable targets for brain decoding.

  Spiking Neural Networks for fMRI-Based Visual Semantic Decoding · 2026

• The Front-Triad's cues are culturally tuned even where the underlying needs (warmth, safety, recognition) are broadly human; gesture and contact norms especially require local validation. Self-report welcome measures carry expectancy effects, mitigated by observer coding and physiological triangulation. Individual differences (introverted or distressed guests may want efficient warmth, not effusive warmth) call for calibrated rather than maximal warmth. Future work should test channel interactions, the WQ– R.O.W. linkage longitudinally, the optimal human–automation handoff, and whether deep-acting training measurably raises both the Duchenne Dividend and agent wellbeing simultaneously. 12. Conclusion — The Hotel's First Sentence A guest reads a hotel's first sentence at the front desk, and finishes it in about five seconds. The grammar of that sentence is the Front-Triad — the face, the hands, the voice. Its meaning, decided at the Warmth Gate, is am I safe here, and am I welcome? When the answer is yes, the building becomes a HAVEN — the guest is Held, Acknowledged, Valued, Eased, and Named — and every later imperfection is read with goodwill. When the answer is no, the property takes on Welcome Debt it will spend the whole stay repaying. None of this requires capital. It requires a genuine smile (the Duchenne Dividend), five trainable moves (the FRONT Protocol), a metric to manage it (WQ and R.O.W.), technology pointed at friction so humans can be pointed at warmth — and, above all, front-desk people whose own wellbeing is protected well enough that the welcome is real. The guest does not remember being checked in. The guest remembers being received. A great front desk does not process arrivals; it ends a journey and begins a stay with the oldest signal in human hospitality: you are seen, you are safe, you are welcome here.

  Seen Before Served · 2026 · DOI

• Although perceptual modulation by the relationship between anger and red has also been reported from the perspective of electroencephalography (EEG), how variations in perceived emotional intensity are reflected in brain activity remains unclear.

  The congruency between anger intensity and reddish facial color modulates the early posterior negativity (EPN) · 2026 · DOI

• Visual mental imagery (VMI) vividness varies substantially across individuals, yet the structural and molecular bases of this variability remain elusive.

  Predicting visual mental imagery: structural and transcriptomic signatures in the human brain · 2026 · DOI

• An important open question is whether we can use basic perceptual tasks in M/EEG as “neural fingerprint,” akin to fMRI (Finn et al. Notably, in both the original participant and two THINGS participants (1 and 4), the effects were limited to a narrow post-stimulus window(∼200–300 ms), rather than being distributed uniformly across the trial, which is inconsistent with typical environmental noise sources.

  Long-term variability in visual processing versus perceptual stability · 2026 · DOI

• Several limitations should be considered. First, MEG–fMRI fusion relies on second-order representational correspondence and does not directly measure neural activity within each ROI. The inferred time courses therefore reflect when MEG signals express representational structure similar to fMRI-defined patterns, rather than direct activation of those regions. Second, imagery-related signals may be affected by trial-by-trial temporal variability. Although the familiarity and stabilization procedure was designed to reduce variability, residual temporal jitter may have contributed to the sustained patterns observed. Third, the weak imagery-related effects in the color-selective ROI should be interpreted cautiously, as they may reflect lower signal-to-noise ratio, variability in color representations, or limitations in ROI definition rather than absence of color imagery. Fourth, while the present analyses distinguish domain-general and domain-specific representational structure, they do not establish causal interactions among frontoparietal regions, the FIN, and domain-preferring VTC. Studies using lesion data (Bartolomeo, 2002; Bartolomeo et al., 2002; Kutsche et al., 2026), effective connectivity or perturbation approaches will be necessary to determine the directionality of information flow. Finally, the present study focused on typical imagers; extending this framework to populations with altered imagery abilities (e.g., aphantasia) (Bartolomeo, 2025; Zeman, 2024) will be important for testing the generality of the proposed mechanisms.

  Tracking the mind’s eyes: Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Domain-General and Domain-Specific Visual Mental Imagery · 2026 · DOI

• Background: Existing research on facial emotion processing in Internet gaming disorder (IGD) has focused on single facial expression but little is known about crowd facial emotion (present multiple facial expressions simultaneously) ensemble coding.

  Ensemble coding of crowd facial emotion in Internet gaming disorder under the emotional interference condition: An ERP study · 2025 · DOI

• Finally, we outline open questions and potential future directions with an emphasis on using multiple, ecologically more valid 'ambient' images for each face to assess the ORE in paradigms that capture identity rather than image recognition.

  <scp>Event‐related</scp> brain potential correlates of the <scp>other‐race</scp> effect: A review · 2022 · DOI

• Although the exact mechanisms underlying this selective mimicry response will need to be investigated in future research, these findings provide the first demonstration of the modulation of facial mimicry by cues to group status in preverbal infants and suggest that the foundations for the role that mimicry plays in facilitating social bonds seem to be present during the first year of life.

  Selective facial mimicry of native over foreign speakers in preverbal infants · 2019 · DOI

• Processing of positive and negative facial expressions in infancy follows a distinct course with a bias towards fearful facial expressions starting at 7 months of age; however, little is known about the developmental trajectory of fear processing and other facial expressions, and if this bias is driven by specific regions of the face.

  Rapid face processing for positive and negative emotions in 5‐, 7‐, and 12‐month‐old infants: An exploratory study · 2019 · DOI

• Study 2 used Latent Semantic Analysis to further interrogate the relatedness of the photographs, providing converging evidence that organisation does not account for enhanced recall of disgusting photographs.

  Enhanced recall of disgusting relative to frightening photographs is not due to organisation · 2017 · DOI

• , Öhman, Lundqvist, & Esteves, 2001) that suggest angry faces "pop out" of crowds, our review of the literature found inconsistent evidence for the effect and suggested that low-level visual confounds could not be ruled out as the driving force behind the anger superiority effect.

  The face in the crowd effect unconfounded: Happy faces, not angry faces, are more efficiently detected in single- and multiple-target visual search tasks. · 2011 · DOI

• 67 ms target-mask stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) is insufficient to reliably block either the simple detection or the forced-identification of backwardly masked expressions.

  Unequally masked: Indexing differences in the perceptual salience of "unseen" facial expressions · 2004 · DOI

• It was argued that there is insufficient evidence to endorse Carey's explanation of an encoding switch at age 10 years as a satisfactory account of the development of face recognition.

  Development of face recognition: An encoding switch? · 1985 · DOI

• Future research should consider what different results, if any, might obtain when the pictorial stimulus is varied systematically (e. In WP, at least within the limitations of the present study, the pic- ture probably did not facilitate---and may have inhibited---the subjects' responding.

  Sense-impression responses to differing pictorial and verbal stimuli · 1965 · DOI

• As the original study relied on functional connectivity, it could not assess the directed neural influences required to directly test the mechanistic claims of these theories.

  Testing the Spatiotemporal Predictions of Global Neuronal Workspace Theory and Integrated Information Theory · 2026 · DOI

• Second, multi-unit activity in macaque visual cortex also predicted human beauty judgments, despite the animals highly limited knowledge of the objects.

  Primate visual cortex spontaneously computes the beauty of objects · 2026 · DOI

• This relationship is more pronounced when there is relatively higher uncertainty, suggesting that facial similarity is a heuristic investors tend to rely on when concrete “hard” information is scarce.

  A Familiar Face: Measuring Visual Similarity in Venture Capital · 2026 · DOI

• The human visual system can identify objects in complex natural scenes, yet the mechanisms supporting robust perception under such variable conditions remain incompletely understood.

  Scene Structure Predicts Perceptual Decisions in Naturalistic Detection Tasks · 2026 · DOI

• The findings extend cognitive schema theory to the domain of facial affect representation and highlight self-conscious emotions as an underexplored locus of depression-related perceptual bias.

  Depression Severity Modulates the Cognitive Process of Facial Affect Representation: Evidence from a Genetic-Algorithm Face Synthesis Task · 2026 · DOI

• In these settings, other biographical details-such as name or date of birth on an identity document-are also often compared to existing records, but the impact of these concurrent checks on decisions has not been examined.

  Verifying unfamiliar identities: Effects of processing name and face information in the same identity-matching task · 2022 · DOI

• Dissociative phenomena seem to be involved, whereas the effects of non-pathological dissociation on strange-face illusions have not yet been directly investigated.

  Strange-face illusions during eye-to-eye gazing in dyads: specific effects on derealization, depersonalization and dissociative identity · 2019 · DOI

• However, because the focus has typically been on the verbal output of the formed impressions, little is known about how impressions resulting from different trait combinations impact perceivers' expectations about facial content.

  Combining Traits Into a Face: A Reverse Correlation Approach · 2019 · DOI

• However, this work did not control for potential differences in organisation between the disgusting and frightening stimuli that could account for enhanced memory for disgusting photographs.

  Enhanced recall of disgusting relative to frightening photographs is not due to organisation · 2017 · DOI

Most-cited papers in Face Recognition and Perception

• CONSPEC and CONLERN: A two-process theory of infant face recognition. · Psychological Review · 1991 · 793 citations
• The Simulation of Smiles (SIMS) model: Embodied simulation and the meaning of facial expression · Behavioral and Brain Sciences · 2010 · 423 citations
• Effects of Dynamic Aspects of Facial Expressions: A Review · Emotion Review · 2013 · 337 citations
• Perceptual Learning: Toward a Comprehensive Theory · Annual Review of Psychology · 2014 · 309 citations
• Revealing the multidimensional mental representations of natural objects underlying human similarity judgements · Nature Human Behaviour · 2020 · 268 citations
• The development of emotional face processing during childhood · Developmental Science · 2006 · 255 citations
• Brain activity differentiates face and object processing in 6-month-old infants. · Developmental Psychology · 1999 · 250 citations
• The face in the crowd effect unconfounded: Happy faces, not angry faces, are more efficiently detected in single- and multiple-target visual search tasks. · Journal of Experimental Psychology General · 2011 · 211 citations
• Contact, configural coding and the other‐race effect in face recognition · British Journal of Psychology · 2007 · 190 citations
• The neural processing of familiar and unfamiliar faces: A review and synopsis · British Journal of Psychology · 2011 · 158 citations

Most recent work

• Self-supervised learning yields representational signatures of category-selective cortex · bioRxiv · 2026
• Concurrent category-selective neural activity across the ventral occipito-temporal cortex supports a non-hierarchical view of human visual recognition · bioRxiv · 2026
• Faces and bodies are increasingly integrated along the visual hierarchy in humans and deep neural networks · bioRxiv · 2026
• Understanding the influence of design-related factors on human–AI teaming in a face matching task · Cognitive Research Principles and Implications · 2026
• Do people forget your name? Your face might be the problem: The effect of cue memorability on recall of associations. · Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition · 2026
• Face Speaks: Visual Interpretation Vis-à-vis AI in Swaroopology · The Indian Journal of Pediatrics · 2026
• The asymmetric bias: race-based lightness perception fades only for female faces, not for male · Psychological Research · 2026
• Symposium Session 2 - Mapping Emotions in the Brain Beyond Localization: How Neuroimaging and Machine Learning Can Reshape Contemporary Theoretical Frameworks · JoCN Forum · 2026
• Breakthrough percepts of familiar faces · Brain Informatics · 2026
• Integrated information and predictive processing theories of consciousness: An adversarial collaborative review · Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews · 2026

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