Faces are special stimuli to humans because they convey an enormous range of socially relevant information about a person's identity, gender, age, ethnicity, mood, attractiveness, and about a person's current focus of attention or intentions. For more than two decades, a sentence similar to this one has introduced numerous scientific articles on face perception. Faces are so rich in social information that it may be easy to overlook that other visual or auditory cues (plus, of course, those from other senses) play an important role in our perception of other people as well. In fact, person perception research in 1986 was, to a very large extent, equivalent to face perception research.
The idea for this special issue emerged gradually while the two of us discussed creating an international research unit on person perception, a couple of years back. While research activities in face perception have remained strong, the past years have also seen enormous progress in understanding the perception of other ‘socially potent’ stimuli including the human voice or biological motion signals. Thus, general person perception, representing a natural extension of research on face perception, is currently seeing an immense degree of scientific activity from psychologists, biologists, neuroscientists, and computational scientists. At the same time, a great many of today's empirical and theoretical developments in person perception continue to be strongly inspired by one seminal paper, ‘Understanding face recognition’, published by Vicki Bruce and Andy Young (1986) in the British Journal of Psychology.
