Recognizing People in Motion

Natural movements of the face and body, as well as voice, provide converging cues to a person's identity. To date, person recognition has been studied primarily with static images of faces. Face recognition, however, is part of a larger system, whose preeminent goal is to efficiently recognize dynamic familiar people in unconstrained environments. We present a comprehensive framework for understanding person recognition as it happens in the real world. In this framework, dynamic information plays the central role in binding multi-modal information from the face, body, and the voice to achieve robust and highly accurate recognition. The superior temporal sulcus (STS) integrates multisensory, dynamic information from the whole person for recognition, thereby complementing its role in social cognition.