Abstract
Faces and words are ever-present stimuli in social environments that require fine-grained, efficient discrimination of their constituents in order to acquire meaning. Provided that these stimuli share multiple characteristics, while simultaneously being different visual object categories in important ways, a debate has ensued pertaining to whether their processing can be reduced to a common mechanism or whether each category mobilizes exclusive resources. We thus first present briefly domain-specific and domain-general accounts, as opposing perspectives that highlight the absence and presence of commonalities in face and word processing, respectively. We then focus on how faces and words are processed. While faces are usually associated with holistic processing of facial features, to create a perceptual whole, there is no such consensus pertaining to word processing. Words have been argued to rely on either letter-by-letter processing or in a way closer to that of faces, since they are also objects of expertise. Lastly, we advance the debate by providing an overview of our latest research findings. These findings provide a more direct comparison of face and word processing, by incorporating both stimuli in one task concurrently.
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Francisco Cruz
Invited Assistant Professor
Francisco Cruz is an invited assistant professor in psychology, statistics, and methods at the Faculdade de Psicologia, Universidade de Lisboa, and Faculdade de Ciências da Saúde, Universidade Europeia. Junior Consulting Editor at the Journal of European Social Psychology, 2025-present. Social Psychology Ph.D. on lay beliefs about science, supervised by Prof. André Mata (Universidade de Lisboa) and Prof. Tania Lombrozo (Princeton University), 2022-2025. Visiting Student Research Collaborator at Princeton University, 2023-2024. Society for General Psychology and Interdisciplinary Inquiry, Fulbright Portugal, and Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia awardee. His research interests include lay beliefs about science (i.e., what people believe that science can or cannot explain and why), motivated beliefs in science (i.e., the contexts in which people are more prone to accepting scientific explanations), representation of social groups (i.e., how people integrate information to provide judgments on shared homogeneity vs. heterogeneity across group members), epistemic trespassing (i.e., when people provide judgments on domains beyond those in which they are experts), intuitive mind-body dualism (i.e., a natural tendency to see the world as split in material and immaterial portions), and face perception (i.e., features driving the advantage in recall for own- vs. other-race faces).