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Connectionist models of face recognition, identification, and categorization have appeared recently in several disciplines, including psychology, computer science, and engineering. We present a review of these models with the goal of complementing a recent survey by Samal and Iyengar [Pattern Recognition25, 65–77 (1992)] of nonconnectionist approaches to the problem of the automatic face recognition. We concentrate on models that use linear autoassociative networks, nonlinear autoassociative (or compression) and/or heteroassociative backpropagation networks. One advantage of these models over some nonconnectionist approaches is that analyzable features emerge naturally from image-based codes, and hence the problem of feature selection and segmentation from faces can be avoided.