Will the Real Ralph Richardson Please Stand Up

Recognising other people is something we do so skilfully and effortlessly that we are not even aware of doing it; not, at least, until we experience difficulties or make errors in the process. Such difficulties and errors are of interest to psychologists because they may give clues about how we recognise people, and about the underlying processes of ‘person perception’. One way of trying to understand more about an everyday psychological process is systematically to examine instances when people’s normally faultless performance breaks down. Gregory’s work with visual illusions, for example, is based on the approach of forcing errors in perceptual processes (see Gregory, 1973). Errors like these can bring to light the features of a process which we are otherwise completely unaware of, both as people and as psycholo-gists.