Abstract: The model that facial expression and facial identity was traditionally viewed as parallel processing is now dubious. More and more evidences tend to establish an interactive model to illustrate the relationship between the processing of facial expression and the processing of facial identity. The article reviewed the literatures on the issue after Face Recognition Functional Model (Bruce & Young, 1986) was proposed, and focused on the debates about parallel or interactive processing between facial expression recognition and facial identity recognition. The distributed neural system was discussed as a recent model, and then an idea of integrative model was proposed based on visual representation and stages of faces perception to illustrate mechanism of facial identity and facial expression recognition.

Key words: facial identity recognition, facial expression recognition, functional model for face recognition, distributed neural system for face recognition, multi-stages integrative model