Abstract
This chapter presents an ecological theory of face perception, which draws on a Gibsonian approach to perception. This theory is offered not as a hypothetico-deductive framework, but rather as a general conceptual model that can integrate existing research findings and guide future research questions. It adds to the dual process and face-space models by expanding the attributes perceived in faces, emphasizing the function of face perception to guide adaptive behavior, predicting face perceptions from the overgeneralization of adaptive responses, highlighting dynamic and multimodal cues to face perceptions, and considering the perceiver attunements that moderate face perceptions. The chapter reviews the tenets of the ecological theory of face perception and considers how they inform the perception of four significant facial qualities: familiarity, age, emotion, and attractiveness. It also considers how ostensibly separate domains of face perception may be integrated through the ecological concept of perceived affordances.