Face superiority effect

In psychology, the face superiority effect refers to the phenomena of how all individuals perceive and encode other human faces in memory. Rather than perceiving and encoding single features of a face (nose, eyes, mouth, etc.), we perceive and encode a human face as one holistic unified element. This phenomenon aids our visual system in the recognition of thousands of faces, a task that would be difficult if it were necessary to recognize sets of individual features and characteristics. However, this effect is limited to perceiving upright faces and does not occur when a face is at an unusual angle, such as when faces are upside-down or contorted in phenomena like the Thatcher effect and Pareidolia.