Seeing is Deceiving: The Psychology and Neuroscience of Fake Faces

Face perception is an essential skill for human interaction and social learning, impacting how we build relationships and perceive the world around us. In the modern era, face processing remains important but confronts new challenges due to recent technological advances such as deepfake technology and AI-generated faces. These computer-generated (CG) faces may be difficult for our brains to distinguish from real faces, raising questions in the fields of criminal justice, politics, and animation, to name a few. This review explores the neurobiology of face processing and its interplay with affect, laying the foundation for an investigation into recent studies examining how humans differentiate between real and CG faces. Studies on the uncanny valley effect and pareidolia offer further insights as to how humans make this judgment and the possible boundaries of face perception. Additional research is needed to better understand this emerging area and possibly train human viewers to perform these judgments more accurately in the future.