Abstract: Faces are the foundation of human connection, yet our understanding of face perception has been shaped almost entirely by studies on Western populations. India, home to one-sixth of the world’s population, has remained absent from this research despite its immense diversity. In this talk, I will introduce the first large-scale project on face perception in India, focused on individuals with extraordinary recognition abilities (super recognizers) and those with severe impairments (prosopagnosia). I will discuss how we are developing the Indian Face Memory Test (IFMT), a tool tailored to the unique features of Indian faces, and standardizing clinical protocols for prosopagnosia research in the country. This project not only replicates classic findings such as the face inversion effect across cultures but also asks new questions, such as how contextual cues like clothing, voice, and hairstyle aid recognition when face perception fails. By combining behavioral measures with computational modeling, we aim to uncover both universal and culturally specific principles of face perception.
About the Speaker: Dr. Vaishnavi Mohite is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Vision Lab, Centre for Neuroscience, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Her professional expertise is in cognitive science with a focus on attention, perception, and face recognition. She has published in leading journals such as Nature Human Behaviour, Memory & Cognition, and Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics. Her recent work includes the Indian Face Perception Project, the first large-scale study of face recognition abilities in India, which seeks to understand how we see the real world through behavioral, eye-tracking, and computational methods.She is the recipient of several honors, including the SynTalk Research Medallion (2025) and the Psychonomic Society’s J. Frank Yates Award (2022).