Levels of Representation and Memory for Face

In this chapter, I intend, first, to describe some general ideas about visual representations, and second, to relate those ideas to face representation and recognition. My general assumption regarding visual representations is that such representations may exist at various levels of abstraction, and that to some extent at least, levels can be nested. When applied to faces, these ideas suggest that faces may be represented in human memory at different levels of abstraction, which in turn leads to implications for performance in memory tasks.