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Scientists Decipher the Neural Code For Faces (scientificamerican.com)
New submitter akakaak writes: In a new paper published in Cell, researchers Le Chang and Doris Tsao claim to have uncovered "The Code for Facial Identity in the Primate Brain." They develop a model representing each face as a vector in a 50-dimensional "face-space," and show that the firing rate for each face-sensitive neuron represents the location along a single axis through this space. This allows them to accurately predict the appearance of a viewed face from the collective recorded activity of the neurons. This work is a major advance in the decoding of complex neural representations, and refutes exemplar-based models of face recognition. Further reading: Scientific American
Basically, the result from the paper show that from the data recorded from the primates' neurons, it is possible to recreate with high accuracy the image the monkeys saw.
The potential technology developed from this finding would astounding. For example, a scanner could be developed that could allow police to ask a victim to remember what the criminal looked like and produce a near photographic image of him.