Face recognition and its variation across the visual field

We are experts at face recognition. Our visual system is similarly specialised, with a network of face-selective brain regions. How does this specialisation arise? We aim to investigate this through recently discovered variations in the appearance of faces across the visual field. These variations in high-level properties (such as perceived gender and age) will then be compared with lower-level processes (e.g. position perception) and neuroimaging (fMRI) estimates of receptive field size in visual cortex. With this combination of psychophysics and neuroimaging we hope to determine both the processes that contribute to high-level specialisation and the neural basis of these abilities.