How Does Facial Recognition Occur in the Brain?
The first step in finding practical applications for facial recognition is to investigate the biological mechanisms behind it. The Science Daily reports that research at Tel Aviv University in Israel is focusing on the specific area of our brains responsible for processing information about human and animals faces, how we recognize and interpret facial expressions, and exploring what makes the recognition part of the brain unique.
Dr. Galit Yovel of Tel Aviv University is trying to understand the mechanisms at work in the face area of the brain, which is called the “fusiform gyrus.” In combining cogitative psychology with techniques like brain imaging and electrophysiology to study how the brain processes information about faces, Yovel is utilizing recent research that was published in the Journal of Neuroscience and Human Brain Mapping.
Facial recognition technology has numerous applications, for example, it can help business executives better match names with faces, among other things. We’ve reported on facial recognition sensors and software that can be used in criminal identification lineups and security checkpoints to deter terrorist or criminal threats. Yovel says the way humans interpret facial expressions is not intuitive and raises the question of how the information is combined in our brain to understand how separate face and body areas generate a while body-image impression.
If we regularly interact with faces in meaningful settings, we are better able to recognize them. Humans recognize human faces holistically – and Yovel says that additions to your face like a beard or glasses are assimilated into or incorporated into the face recognition gestalt of the brain. This doesn’t occur with elements that are irrelevant to facial recognition, like the chair you’re sitting on for example.
Inability to recognize faces is common, and two percent of all people are born with what is called “face blindness” or prosopagnosia. Yovel hopes that her research will enable these people to train themselves with software so that they can better differentiate one face from another.
Yovel first studied the neurological basis of face recognition in her post-doctorate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Faces, she says, are quite similar to one another, and that’s why we’ve evolved these complete and specialized areas of the brain devoted to facial recognition. Think about how many faces you see on a daily basis? Without this part of the brain, you wouldn’t be able to distinguish one face from another.
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