What is the Bruce and Young model of face recognition?
Bruce and Young’s model of face recognition is a classic “box and arrow” model. As with all cognitive models, the intention is to model functions and processes without trying to identify the actual mechanisms or brain locations involved. This imposes a limit on what such a model can tell us. These cognitive models do not tell us about which areas of the brain are involved in relevant processing, but the location of processing does not make any difference to the model of functioning. The mechanism itself is not relevant to the functions either. Bruce and Young’s model is based on observations of both patients and normals. They postulated from such evidence that face recognition is a modular series of processes, or in other words, is done in stages.
