Recognising faces as faces is an automatic, yet crucial process for everyday life. In this article, we ask how factors – in this case, colour – helps the categorisation process at a neural level.

Participants were shown coloured images of faces and objects, as well as grayscale images. These were presented in rapid succession, while participants wore an electroencephalogram (EEG).
When the task involved identifying shapes, neural responses unique to face images with colour was found. The authors found increased activity in the occipitemporal region in the right hemisphere of the brain after a 415ms latency.

Overall, the study’s findings suggests that colour contributes at later stages of processing, and aids face recognition when other visual information available are less ‘diagnostic’. That is, if a person stands beside a neon-coloured mannequin, you might register their face as a ‘face’ rather than the mannequin since humans are rarely neon-coloured.

 

Reference

Or, C. C.-F., Retter, T. L., & Rossion, B. (2019). The contribution of color information to rapid face categorization in natural scenes. Journal of Vision, 19(5), 1-20.