Are faces special? For most of us, the human face is one of the most common visual stimuli experienced on a daily basis. From birth we begin to identify the faces of those around us, quickly becoming an everyday thing that we didn't pay much attention to. In the following pages I will discuss face perception and the cognitive functions behind it, prosopagnosia, and the question of whether faces are somehow different from specialized recognition of other objects. Why exactly are faces important to us? Evolutionarily, faces have played a key role in survival: knowing whether an approaching face belongs to a friend or a foe could very well make the difference between death and survival. Today, faces continue to play a central role in human interaction. In fact, studies show that faces also influence the perception of speech: according to the McGurk effect there is a clear connection between what you see and what you hear¹. In this study, a video is shown of someone repeatedly saying a single-syllable sound, such as “ba.” After a moment, the image switches to an identical clip, but this time the person is saying "go." Although the audio still remains as "ba", the image will confuse the subject's brain into thinking that they are actually now hearing "va". QUOTE. A third essential factor of face perception is how it communicates social information such as physical attributes (age, gender, identity), facial expressions (mood and emotional state), and interest or attention (direction of gaze)².To understand how they are once faces have been perceived, we must explore the main cognitive functions starting from the basic recognition of objects. From the primary visual cortex, a visual stimulus is taken along the dorsal and ventral area... to the center of the paper... execution implies that the FFA actually plays a role in all specialized object recognitions, and that a decrease the efficiency of recognition can be explained by the idea of ​​competition in FFA; the first test proved more difficult for car experts because the FFA had to divide between two areas of expertise - faces and cars - while the second task proved much easier because the objects were processed in separate areas of the brain (faces in the FFA and watches in the LOC, as no one was a watch expert). ¹⁴Both of these sides clearly have good research to back them up, which is why the question of whether faces are special or not still remains. However, one thing is certain: whatever the true neurological compound, object and face recognition is something incredibly complex, exciting and fascinating - and therefore special - in itself..