Domain-Specific versus Domain-General View of Face Processing

Domain-Specific versus Domain-General View of Face Processing
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April 23, 2020
The ability of the mind to recognize faces (and objects) is perhaps one of the most studied and debated aspects of the field of psychology. Mainly, one of these debates talks about the difference between whether the mind focuses a single or multiple knowledge structures in order to recognize different faces. On the one hand, proponents of domain-specific learning posit that people use different specialized knowledge structures that give them an advantage at particular tasks as compared to others. On the other hand, however, those who support the idea of a domain-general point-of-view stipulate that people utilize a coherent form of knowledge in order to perform different tasks, which includes the recognition of faces. Accordingly, the subsequent sections of this paper would try to discuss the various studies conducted about these two different types of learning. All in all, the author believes that despite the good points of each side, a person’s facial recognition skills are centered upon domain-specific learning since as compared to a general type of education.
Domain-Specific vs. Domain-General learning
As stated earlier, proponents of the domain-general learning posit that the ability of a person to recognize faces is centered upon a cohesive knowledge structure from which most of his mental faculties come from. Thus, this means that growth and improvement in one facet of knowledge (i.e., critical thinking skills) could perhaps lead to an increase in another skill (i.e., face recognition ability). Furthermore, they argue that this type of learning is evident based on the development since children recognize themselves early during their development state, which is also indicative of a “higher social ability” CITATION Sug08 \l 1033 (Sugiura, et al., 2008). In an article written by Gauthier et al. (2014), the authors have cited a number of studies that shows that improvement in neural processes that focus on “processing” and “strategies” (i.e., Chess) could also lead to an increase in the person’s ability to recognize faces. This points out to a domain-general type of learning since parallel improvements in other skills have also led to a development in facial recognition processes CITATION Sug08 \l 1033 (Sugiura, et al., 2008).
In contrast to this, the domain-specific perspective suggests that a human’s facial recognition ability is dependent upon a specialized knowledge structure. It is independent of other skills and abilities, which suggests that improving a person’s ability to recognize faces must be done through experience. In fact, most evidence would point out that there is a higher correlation between facial recognition and this paradigm. For example, in a study conducted by Sugiura et al. (2008), the authors were able to measure electrical activities in a person’s medial cortical structures during a face and name recognition experiments that show that facial recognition is not dependent upon the utterance of a particular name. This highly suggests that a person’s ability to recognize faces is no relia...