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An important issue in face processing concerns what informa-tion is crucial for facial identification. Specifically, what indi-vidual variation among faces does the visual system use to identify them? The main issue concerns whether this diagnos-tic variance is local to facial features or global to the patterns comprising facial features. To illustrate, it is undeniable that faces vary locally: Noses, for example, can be turned up, hawk shaped, Greek, Roman, Nubian, or snub, and human visual cognition categorizes distinctive facial features, such as almond-shaped eyes, pouty mouths, square jaws, and weak chins. But the question of whether this undeniable local vari-ance of faces generally contributes to their identification is still highly controversial. In ecologically valid conditions, faces are recognized over a wide variety of poses and conditions of illumination, eve