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Face Recognition Needs 3 Areas Of Human Brain
sushant_bhatia_progr writes "Nature has an article on the recent discovery that face recognition in humans targets 3 areas of the human brain. Using mugshots of celebrities, Pia Rotshtein at University College London and her colleagues have shown that there are at least three separate areas for processing and recognising faces. One processes the physical features of the face, one decides whether or not the face is known, and a third retrieves information about that person, such as their name. Rothstein's team used a computer to create a series of images in which the countenance of film star Marilyn Monroe gradually morphed into that of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, or that of James Bond actor Pierce Brosnan transformed into current prime minister Tony Blair."
Gotta love having enough celebs with mugshots to run an entire research experiment. :)
transforming a picture of GWB into a Monkey?
to kill off men and women's fantasies. Now all I see is Margret Thacher sing happy birthday, Mr. President.
*shudder*
I think I just inherited Wil Wheaton's sleeping disorder.
If I wrote something witty, you would say I stole it from somewhere.
When was Blair or Thatcher arrested?
I guess it's not just american politicians that are all crooks!
it's a friggin' joke!
Rothstein's team used a computer to create a series of images in which the countenance of film star Marilyn Monroe gradually morphed into that of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, or that of James Bond actor Pierce Brosnan transformed into current prime minister Tony Blair."
A more interesting experiment would have been to morph Marilyn Monroe into Pierce Brosnan, and Margaret Thatcher into Tony Blair. Or Marilyn to Tony and Pierce to Maggie. Or for that matter, Marilyn Monroe to Marilyn Manson to Charles Manson...
Don't know that you would have gotten much useful research done, though.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
"Rothstein's team used a computer to create a series of images in which the countenance of film star Marilyn Monroe gradually morphed into that of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, or that of James Bond actor Pierce Brosnan transformed into current prime minister Tony Blair."
And the fourth part of the brain. Recognizing the horror of it all.
...because I have a great memory for faces. I can almost always tell when/where I've seen a specific person...
...But I won't remember their name for the life of me...
Celebrity shots probe face recognition
Helen Pearson
The brain uses three steps to identify faces.
The features in this set of images change gradually, yet our brains flip suddenly from seeing Margaret Thatcher to seeing Marilyn Monroe. © Dr Jenny Gimpel/University College London By transforming the features of Margaret Thatcher into those of Marilyn Monroe, researchers have revealed hints about how our brains put a name to a face.
Neuroscientists already know that certain spots in the brain play a vital role for recognizing a familiar face, even as it changes with age or a new hairstyle. But they have not been clear precisely what each area does.
Using mugshots of celebrities, Pia Rotshtein at University College London and her colleagues have shown that there are at least three separate areas for processing and recognising faces. One processes the physical features of the face, one decides whether or not the face is known, and a third retrieves information about that person, such as their name.
Rothstein's team used a computer to create a series of images in which the countenance of film star Marilyn Monroe gradually morphed into that of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, or that of James Bond actor Pierce Brosnan transformed into current prime minister Tony Blair.
Although the physical features gradually change from one face into another, the researchers showed that subjects looking at the images tend to "suddenly flip" from seeing Marilyn to seeing Maggie, explains team member Jon Driver.
The researchers then showed their subjects three different pairs of images from the array while they were in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scanner. The two pictures in one pair were identical; in another pair they had different physical characteristics but were both still recognizable as Maggie; and in the other pair they differed by the same degree in their physical characteristics, yet one was still recognizable as Maggie and the other as Marilyn.
The study allowed the team to pick out the three areas of the brain that carry out different tasks when someone walks into a room. The first region, a pair of structures at the back of the brain called the inferior occipital gyri, was most active when the physical features, such as eyes and hair, in the two pictures differed. It appears to analyse these physical characteristics.
A second region, the right fusiform gyrus, located just behind the ears, was most active when one picture showed Maggie and one showed Marilyn. This region appears to distinguish between faces, perhaps by comparing the face to known ones.
A third area, the anterior temporal cortex, appears to store knowledge connected to the faces. This region was most active when people knew the famous subjects particularly well; less so in those who, for example, were less familiar with the British politicians.
The study is the first to clearly show these three separate stages of face processing, says psychologist Isabel Gauthier, who studies face and object recognition at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.
Driver says he now wants to study patients who, through injury or disease, have particular problems recognising people. Some people with prosopagnosia, or face-blindness, may be unable to recognise faces as familiar as their own children. Patients with dementia may struggle to put a name to a household face.
Driver wants to examine whether he can match up patients' specific problems to different defects within the brain regions identified by the team. He also wants to find out whether some patients could be trained to revamp these failing regions.
We need 3 parts of the brain to recognize celebrities.
-One to recognize the face and map it to its info.
-One to categorize the info as hot girl or not.
-One to ignore the not-hot-girls.
Marilyn Monroe gradually morphed into that of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher
Whoever though of that is one sick scary F***er!!!
If you take Marilyn Manson's face to start with, you came make it look like Maggie Thatcher without any morphinh.
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"One processes the physical features of the face"
Would that be called the sense of sight, perhaps?
"one decides whether or not the face is known"
And this one seems to be visual memory.
"a third retrieves information about that person, such as their name." And this one we typically call ordinary memory.
I can't say I know what I'm talking about, but this seems kind of obvious. It sounds like they're saying, "well you see the face, recognize it, and identify it."
... it's pretty clear that Tony Blair has been morphing into Thatcher for years.
Shame he doesn't have her balls, though.
Saw a show on discovery maybe a year or two ago in which some guy had mapped a huge sample of faces down to a transparent relief. It was meant to be an ideal representation of what we look for as 'beautiful' in the opposite / same sex (or seperate species - depending on ones personal preference, not that I care anyway.) It seemed relatively accurate - at least when it was placed over the faces of movie stars and other popular entertainers.
Which of their three categories provides that recognition?, I don't know, but maybe it is worth thinking about. Can't discount the primative sex urge.
And boobs. Mmmmm Boobs... That's where I look first. The face, that might be second... might not...
Sometimes, "context" can be more telling than just the face. Brittany's are way bigger, IMHO.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Same here, but I found a trick that helps.
When you meet someone, and they or someone else tell you their name, repeat it back ("oh, I have a cousin named Jill" or "hmm, John's an unusual name"), and there's a very good chance you'll at least remember what you said later on.
I do something similar with passwords. Normally, they're a jumble of letters and numbers from something around me when I needed to think of them, and usually I can remember what that thing was, so the password then pops into my head.
IAAfA (I am an fMRI analyst) Of course, the last highly publicized study that gave us a "face recognition area" of the brain turned out to be a crock. The same haemodynamic response came from birdwatchers seeing birds, or car experts seeing cars. It was a cognitive recognition area, not just a "face recognition area". I wouldn't be suprized if this experiment had the same falicies (article wasn't very precise).
Modularization: Great for OO programming, crappy for the human brain.
So true!
No, the implications of this are staggering.
"...film star Marilyn Monroe gradually morphed into that of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher."
Or as it's known in medicine, 'the anti-Viagra.'
The only acceptable defense of scientific results is to say that they were the product of the Scientific Method.
I think the fact that this is currently modded Funny is funnier than the actual post...
Intel and AMD today announced plans to market Triple Core CPUs specifically for the facial recognition industry.
Security officials today claimed the improvements these triple core chips will bring may actually make their airport scanning devices useful.
liqbase
how many parts of the brain do I use when I'm analysing tities?
Agreed
I know this is outlandish, but I wonder if there'll be a drug that enhances the temporal cortex (I know it's a huge generalization for neuroscience), which according to this article is related to familiarity of the subject being observed. It might one day be a treatment for racism. People generalize and say "All people look the same" but if we were more easily able to recognize the individual instead of merely the racial traits, it could be one more evil that humanity can overcome through science.
:)
I would think it's unethical for the government to force someone accused of a hate crime to take such a drug, but like a rapist might choose castration, perhaps a racist criminal can get a lighter sentence by choosing such a pill
There's a disorder called prosopagnosia (face-blindness) Where the afflicted cannot identify people's faces. Here's a couple of links to pages written by people who have it. It lends credence to the theory that there are entire portions of the brain dedicated to the recognition of faces.
h link.net/~blankface/prosopagnosia .shtml
= 1&q=pros opagnosia&spell=1
http://www.prosopagnosia.com/
http://home.eart
Here's the google search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&c2coff
Thanks to the internet, we can now all die alone together! -SomeWoman
True it is no surprise that the three intuitive components of face recognition (see, recognize, identify) show activation in different regions of the brain. But these type of "it's obvious & intuitive" comments follow many scientific discoveries, especially those in psychology, and entirely miss the point of the experimental method - to prove (or disprove) those intuitions.
Evar on /.
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The title implies these areas are needed, but really, only that activity is found in these three areas. To show need, they would have to ablate these areas and block recognition (and even that could have some problems). They show sufficiency at best.
I imagine you could do this in chimps with chimp celebrities, but outside of GW, we may not know who's who of chimp celebrities.
I didn't RTFA, but this is just a thought.
and the butt. The way they walk. Don't get me wrog, boobies are nice, but not a determinant of attractiveness.
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"One processes the physical features of the face"
Would that be called the sense of sight, perhaps?
Erm... no. That would be called "the fist".
The problem with such a racist is not their thoughtcrime, failing to recognize racial differences, but their actions. If they can't (or won't) notice differences among individuals of other races, that's they're problem. When they burn these people's houses down, beat them in nightclubs, refuse to hire them, or do other bad things, it doesn't really matter that their facial recognition is wired wrong.
When we make thoughts illegal, we're faced with legislating people's minds. Not only politically catastrophic in a free society, but probably medically irresponsible to pretend we are in control of all the results. We have a flawed, but much more successful, history of managing behavior. We should stick to what we know until we've improved it to adequacy, before messing with minds and all the worse consequences at stake.
--
make install -not war
the countenance of film star Marilyn Monroe gradually morphed into that of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher
You don't need computers for that. You just need to wake up next to someone you don't remember meeting.
For more information on the subject, listen to the song "9 Coronas".
I am officially gone from
Like all those people with head injuries, syphilis and other problems didn't tell us this years ago.
Try taking acid, it's a lot cheaper than MRI &co, and will point you in the right direction.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Go to http://www.pubmed.com/ and look up prosopagnosia. Dig a little, and you'll see there are a lot more than three areas.
Also, activation (by fMRI) does not equal utilization of separate pathways.
Although the physical features gradually change from one face into another, the researchers showed that subjects looking at the images tend to "suddenly flip" from seeing Marilyn to seeing Maggie, explains team member Jon Driver.
What other possibility was there? Since our circuitry is made to identify the faces, it's not exactly trained to say "60% that and 40% this."
In related news, subjects were found to "suddenly flip" between saying No and Yes when asked "Did you have enough of that?"
I can't remember names or faces.
:-)
Although luckily I'm half-decent at recognising voices. Still, it's a bit embarrassing to almost walk past a friend without noticing them, and to not be able to recall their name when they do say hello...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
"hmm, John's an unusual name"
i bet they will remember you
Step One: Processes the physical features of the face.
Step Two: Decide whether or not the face is known. Step Three: Retrieve information about that person.
Step Four: ???????????
Step Five: Profit!
Don't you need eyes too?
http://tlc.discovery.com/convergence/humanface/art icles/mask.html
Six score characters.
Brevity being wit's soul
I have enough space.
My opinion is that without huge mathematical skils this project will sink in oblivion right from now. I don't know waht they're doing or what they can do, but the truth is that without math all serious projects remains on the begin stage or become in work to sci-fi books. The history had proven it.
art world
You think that's embarassing?
I once met a girl when I was drunk, and when I went to meet her and a friend of hers the next day, I wasn't sure who was who at first.
...to avoid the obvious karma whoring?
This is simply a troll, looking for mod points.
I once took a huge dose of special k, and the only major visual hallucination I experienced was not being able to recognise people's faces. I had to look out for my friends based on what they were wearing (it was horrible).
Anyway, does anybody know if special k affects the same parts of the brain mentioned in TFA?
saxwell
a friend of mine told me he thought it folly to model computational devices after the structure of the human brain.
I told him how interesting it was that the brain had short term memory and long term memory just like a computer has ram and hard drives- and how we have eyes which are like a video card and so on...
he told me it was dumb to compare computers to humans in any sense - being that the processes used by the brain vs computer were so vastly different that any comparison was rendered invalid merely by the underlying structure.
but I wasn't completely sure. after all, a chair has arms and legs and a head - but that's not to say it is exactly the same as a human body.
The chair has simply been designed to accomodate
our body-form.
in this same way I feel that computers have been designed to acoomodate our thinking-form. they operate in a way which makes sense to us.
so, this brings me back - should we be trying to make our artificial intelligences mimic the way we do things?
or perhaps, whereas the chair forms the body BUT a car uses wheels instead of legs and thus breaks from the human form, should we explore other methods of processing that are a departure from the way we know?
Nonetheless, connectionist models suggest there are different neural activation patterns which encode Monroe and Thatcher. Contrary to your statement, a given image may indeed activate 60% of the Monroe network, and 40% of the Thatcher network. These activations may even be projected to the alleged "recognition" center if they are below 100% or some other critical threshhold.
What is interesting is that we are conscious only of this "sudden flip", suggesting that the cohesive human experience of facial recognition is in fact dependent on a single threshhold activation weight at some undetermined location.
If I read another "this is obvious" type of statement, I'm going to scream...
Not only has the recognition and category task been done in primates (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/29 1/5502/312) but all three of these areas have been found in previous fMRI experiments.
I actually find these results extremely misleading -- there is no way that these three processes occur in complete isolation across these three areas. The recognition and recall task has been shown to rely on hippocampal regions (through lesion studies). A correlative finding is very weak.
..film star Marilyn Monroe gradually morphed into that of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, or that of James Bond actor Pierce Brosnan transformed into current prime minister Tony Blair.
Although the physical features gradually change from one face into another, the researchers showed that subjects looking at the images tend to be "suddenly turned off" from seeing Marilyn turn into Maggie, explains team member Jon Driver.
"I've never seen an erection go flacid so quickly" explains team member Richard Head, "and I've seen a lot of erections..."
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
UCL? hey i go.. somewhere near there thats not quite as good and doesnt have a news article :(
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I dunno. Thatch was anti-union, Blair (while moving away from labour (union) values) seems to weathercock in whatever direction the current middle class pinko populist opinion is (while being consistantly and secretly evil in a totalitarian way). Thatch was more WYSIWYG, where Blair is more hypocritical.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
The only Special K that I've heard of is a breakfast cereal in the US. Presumably, the Special K you mention is an informal name for some form of medication/intoxicant.
Either that, or there's something Kellogs needs to come clean about.
Thanks to the internet, we can now all die alone together! -SomeWoman
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4086319.stm
Links to a video of it there, and a few possible technologies
When we make thoughts illegal, we're faced with legislating people's minds.
Where I come from, "legislating people's minds" is called Titles 17 and 35, United States Code.
No. People with prosopagnosia can often have excellent or even photographic visual memory, yet have an extremely hard time at best recognizing faces. Irlen Syndrome can make it hard to perceive objects as a whole, even if we have extremely good physical vision. There really is no such thing as "ordinary memory" -- the brain accesses and stores information in quite a variety of ways. I can't remember (ironically) the name for the specific loss of name-recognition, but it does exist, and is common in people born with other neurological abnormalities like the above.
Breast recognition requires no brain activity...
His eyes and nerves were fine, but the visual processing part of his brain had been killed. So signals were coming through, just not ones that you and I associate with sight.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
Legs. And...where her legs meet her back. That whole region, really...and above it.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
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Morphing Marilyn into Maggie dissociates physical and identity face representations in the brain
Pia Rotshtein, Richard N A Henson, Alessandro Treves, Jon Driver, & Raymond J Dolan
How the brain represents different aspects of faces remains controversial. Here we presented subjects with stimuli drawn from morph continua between pairs of famous faces. In the paired presentations, a second face could be identical to the first, could share perceived identity but differ physically (30% along the morph continuum), or could differ physically by the same distance along the continuum (30%) but in the other direction. We show that, behaviorally, subjects are more likely to classify face pairs in the third paired presentation as different and that this effect is more pronounced for subjects who are more familiar with the faces. In functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), inferior occipital gyrus (IOG) shows sensitivity to physical rather than to identity changes, whereas right fusiform gyrus (FFG) shows sensitivity to identity rather than to physical changes. Bilateral anterior temporal regions show sensitivity to identity change that varies with the subjects' pre-experimental familiarity with the faces. These findings provide neurobiological support for a hierarchical model of face perception.
if you know the faces and hear the name.. you see that face in your mind.
what about nonfacial recognition..
like goatse?
I think what they actually have here is proof the recognizing pictures of people you don't actually know in real life requires 3 areas of the brain. Are there any comparative studies that contrast celebritity photos vs. photos of people the subject knows in real life? Or photos of people vs. people who are actually, physically present?
I do that with passwords too. Whenever I change my password, I announce out loud, "hmm, 57chjk;p is an unusual password". Then I can remember it, just like everyone else.
you can count the nausea brain zone out -
Seeing Ms. Monroe turn into Margaret Thatcher is bound to make anyone a bit green in the gills...
Similarly sort of on topic, I'm wondering if this research toward facial recognition will aid any of the ongoing Aspberger's Syndrome and Autism research. For Aspie's, it's not so much the recognition of the face that's the problem as the information the face is conveying (i.e. happiness, sadness, etc.). This could contribute toward that end of the research.
Some of you already have those cute little shirts on that say disco sucks, right? That's not all that sucks.-Frank Zappa
I have had this condition all my life, and it was only earlier this year that I found that it's called prosopagnosia. I have always been horrible at recognizing people, or confusing two different people for the same person.
It was only a couple of years ago that I realized that I mostly recognize people by their hair, clothes, voice, glasses, location, etc. At a company Christmas party, I was at a total loss identifying our department secretary, whom I see every working day. I've embarrasingly failed to recognize co-workers I've run into outside of work. I rarely recognize anybody my wife invites home, even if they've visited dozens of times. And I'll never forget the horror that came over me when I came within milliseconds of grabbing a woman in a department store who I was absolutely certain was my wife, whom I was expecting to meet there. Only when she spoke to someone else at the last second did I realise it wasn't her! Since then, I promised myself to NEVER attempt to surprise ANYONE.
I can literally look at a captured crook on TV right beside their wanted poster, and not see any similarity whatsoever if there is any difference in hair, angle, lighting, distance from the camera, etc.
I don't seem to have difficulty recognizing members of my own family, but if one of them were to alter their appearence a bit, meet me in an unfamiliar place, not react to seeing me, and didn't talk, I can easily imagine that I might not recognize them.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with vision - I see everyone and everything just fine. I can tell beautiful from ugly, but just seeing a face makes virtually no connection with that person's identity in my mind.
Same here. I have never been in a class at school of which I knew all names/faces even at the end of the year. If I meet people I work with every day at other places then at work, chances are big I won't recognise them. Sometimes even at work I have to think for a minute until I remember a collegue's name. If someone unmasked would rob me by clear daylight I would literally not be able to pick that person from a line-up even five minutes later if my life depended on it.
It is no fun, but I'm glad to see here that I am not the only one suffering from this.
What person will donate an airborne act of love?
Or, my problem
I'll see someone, but it takes me a long time to place the face (often I can't). After I do or if I hear their name, I'll remember where we met, what we were doing, yada yada...
Just yesterday I ran across this article: http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200412/s12634 70.htm
About a blind man that can recognize emotions on people's faces, even though the parts of his brain that process visual information were destroyed by a stroke.
Just goes to show how much of our own brains we don't understand yet.
The U.S. really needs an English to Wisdom dictionary.