Figure 6. .

Two models of active brain regions in face perception and recognition. In both models, an initial branch point occurs where invariant facial features (important for identity recognition) are separated from dynamic aspects of the face (important for emotional expressions and social attention). (A) The refined Gobbini and Haxby (2007) familiar face recognition model has a core system that decodes visual appearance via two streams: one for invariant feature identification and another for dynamic face feature perception. Information from core passes to the extended system, activating either aspects of person knowledge or our own emotions elicited by that person. (B) The O'Toole and colleagues (2002) model expands the original Haxby and colleagues (2000) model. Here, dynamic aspects of a familiar (and unfamiliar) face (e.g., an expressed emotion) are processed in the dorsal visual pathway and an identity signal is sent to the ventral pathway. STS is assumed to be part of the dorsal pathway.