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Faces provide a wide range of information about a person’s identity, race, sex, age and emotional state. In most cases, humans easily derive such information by processes that appear rapid and automatic. However, upon closer inspection one finds these processes to be diverse and complex. In this chapter, the

For some time the relationship between processing of facial expression and facial identity has been in dispute. Using realistic synthetic faces, we re-examined this relationship for both perception and short-term memory. In Experiment 1 subjects tried to identify whether the emotional expression on a probe stimulus face matched the emotional expression on either of two remembered faces that they had just seen. Results showed that identity strongly influenced recognition short-term memory for emotional expression. In Experiment 2, subjects ’ similarity/dissimilarity judgments were transformed by multi-dimensional scaling into a 2-dimensional description of the faces ’ perceptual representations. Distances among stimuli in the MDS representation, which showed a strong linkage of emotional expression and facial identity, were good predictors of correct and false recognitions obtained previously, in Experiment 1. The convergence of results from Experiments 1 and 2 suggests that the overall structure and configuration of the faces ’ perceptual representation may parallel their representation in short-term memory, and that facial identity modulates the representation of facial emotion, both in perception and in memory. The international community has instructed its member

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