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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."
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...
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.
Some years ago (I've long lost the reference) a PhD student in Rhode Island digitized human faces with 256 points and then projected these points through the same points on an androngenous composite of hundreds of faces next to the sample; an "average" face. At some point in a plane beyond the reference face, the points at the ends of the projectors were then re-plotted and joined to form a caracature of the amplified differences between the sample face and the sexless "norm". She showed that her subjects were much more likely to recognize the characature than they were the actual face, and postulated that facial recognition therefore depended on a similar process. One of her samples was Ronald Reagan, but that's the only basis in time I can remember.