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…