Brain’s facial-recognition mechanism revealed

Brain’s facial-recognition mechanism revealed

Caltech researchers have identified the brain mechanisms that enable primates to quickly identify specific faces. In a feat of efficiency, surprisingly few feature-recognition neurons are involved in a process that may be able to distinguish among billions of faces. Each neuron in the facial-recognition system specializes in noticing one feature, such as the width of the part in the observed person’s hair. If the person is bald or has no part, the part-width-recognizing neuron remains silent. A small number of such specialized-recognizer neurons feed their inputs to other layers (patches) that integrate a higher-level pattern (e.g., hair pattern), and these integrate at yet higher levels until there is a total face pattern. This process occurs nearly instantaneously and works regardless of the view angle (as long as some facial features are visible). Also, by cataloging which neurons perform which functions and then mapping these to a relatively small set of composite faces, researchers were able to tell which face a macaque (monkey) was looking at.

These findings seem to correlate closely with Ray Kurzweil’s (Google’s Chief Technology Officer) pattern-recognition theory of mind.

Scientific American article

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