What makes faces special?

What may be special about faces, compared to non-face objects, is that their neural representation may be fundamentally spatial, e.g., Gabor-like. Subjects matched a sequence of two filtered images, each containing every other combination of spatial frequency and orientation, of faces or non-face 3D blobs, judging whether the person or blob was the same or different. On a match trial, the images were either identical or complementary (containing the remaining spatial frequency and orientation content). Relative to an identical pair of images, a complementary pair of faces, but not blobs, reduced matching accuracy and released fMRI adaptation in the fusiform face area. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.