WHAT THE HUMAN FACE TELLS THE HUMAN MIND - SOME CHALLENGES FOR THE ROBOT-HUMAN INTERFACE

The human face serves a variety of different communicative functions i n social interaction. The face mediates person identification, the per ception of emotional expressions and lipreading. Perceiving the direct ion of social attention, and facial attractiveness, also affects inter personal behaviour. This paper reviews these different uses made of fa cial information, and considers their computational demands. The possi ble link between the perception of faces and deeper levels of social u nderstanding is emphasized through a discussion of developmental defic its affecting social cognition. Finally, the implications for the deve lopment of communication between robots and humans are discussed. It i s concluded that it could be useful both for robots to understand huma n faces, and also to display human-like facial gestures themselves.