How do I know you? The cognitive neuroscience of face recognition

Humans are typically highly accurate and efficient at recognising known people from their faces. This ability is remarkable, given that (i) faces can look very different in different pictures and that (ii) we know literally thousands of faces. In this talk, I will outline how EEG and event-related brain potentials have been recently used to further our understanding of the cognitive and neural basis of familiar face recognition. I will present research on how the brain recognises familiar faces despite substantial variability in appearance, how underlying memory representations are organised, and how we establish new representations when we meet new people.