The properties of face recognition

These are special properties of face recognition, but they are not completely unique to faces. When people learn to read, they become experts at holistic recognition of another group of objects that look very similar to one another: printed words. Expert bird watchers also develop this kind of expertise for recognizing birds, and dog show judges develop similar expertise for recognizing dogs. These other kinds of objects elicit the same kinds of holistic processing effects that faces do, including the inversion effect, for people who are experts at recognizing these objects (Tanaka