Richard Russell - Research

Individual Differences in Face Recognition--Prosopagnosia and Super-Recognizers

Prosopagnosia (also called face blindness) is an impairment in the recognition of faces. More information about prosopagnosia can be found at www.faceblind.org. I have also begun studying people with exceptionally good face recognition ability, who I call 'super-recognizers'.

Russell, R., Duchaine, B., & Nakayama, K. (2009) Super-recognizers: People with extraordinary face recognition ability. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 16(2), 252-257. Download Article

The BBC World Service did an excellent piece on super-recognizers. The segment on super-recognizers runs from minute 13:07 to 22:29.

Social Organization of Visual Preference

With Matt Bronstad, a postdoc at Brandeis University, I have investigated the social organization of attractiveness preferences. We have found that siblings, spouses, and close friends have more similar attractiveness preferences than strangers, which raises the possibility of social influences on visual preferences.

Bronstad, P. M., Langlois, J.H. & Russell, R. (2008) Computational models of facial attractiveness judgments. Perception, (37)126-142. Pion Limited, London Download Article

Bronstad, P. M. & Russell, R. (2007) Beauty is in the "we" of the beholder: Greater agreement on facial attractiveness among close relations. Perception, (36)1674-1681. Pion Limited, London Download Article

Representations for Face Recognition

It is commonly assumed that shape is the dominant feature for face recognition, as is the case for most object classes. However, research that I conducted with Pawan Sinha of MIT and Irving Biederman of the University of Southern California, and work by others (especially Alice O'Toole), has shown that surface reflectance and shape are in fact about equally important for face recognition.

Russell, R. & Sinha, P. (2007) Real world face recognition: The importance of surface reflectance properties. Perception, (36)1368-1374. Pion Limited, London Download Article

Russell, R., Biederman, I., Nederhouser, M., & Sinha, P. (2007) The utility of surface reflectance for the recognition of upright and inverted faces. Vision Research, (47) 157-165. Download Article

Sinha, P., Balas, B. J., Ostrovsky, Y., & Russell, R. (2006) Face recognition by humans: 19 results all computer vision researchers should know about. Proceedings of the IEEE, 94(11) 1948-1962. Download Article

Russell, R., Sinha, P., Biederman, I., & Nederhouser, M. (2006) Is pigmentation important for face recognition? Evidence from contrast negation. Perception, (35) 749-759. Pion Limited, London Download Article

Artificial Enhancement of Facial Signals

The physical anthropology community has shown that male skin is darker than female skin (e.g. the work of Peter Frost). I have shown that while male skin is darker than female skin, male eyes and lips are not much darker than female eyes and lips. The result is greater contrast in female faces between the eyes, mouth and the rest of the face. People use this sex difference in facial contrast to decide the sex of a face and how masculine or feminine it is. Manipulating this facial contrast has opposite effects on male and female attractiveness. Interestingly, cosmetics exaggerate this sex difference, which suggests that cosmetics are used to manipulate sex differences to make the female face more feminine, and hence attractive.

Russell, R. (in press) A sex difference in facial pigmentation and its exaggerationby cosmetics. Perception Download Preprint

Russell, R. (in press) Why cosmetics work. In Adams, R., Ambady, N., Nakayama, K., & Shimojo, S. (Eds.) The Science of Social Vision. New York: Oxford University Press

Russell, R. (2003) Sex, beauty, and the relative luminance of facial features. Perception, (32) 1093-1107. Pion Limited, London Download Article