Face Recognition is Possible Through Specific Brain Mechanism

Aksamal Akhmetova

Wilmington University

Topic: Face Recognition is Possible through Specific Brain Mechanism

In accordance with some scientists, our brain has unique function that specialized in face recognition only. Meanwhile others believe that facial recognition is the same mechanisms used in other areas of visual skills, such as our ability to recognize different objects.
In “Proceedings of the National Academy of Science” journal that is published by researchers from Harvard and Dartmouth universities, has been mentioned about tests to patients suffering from “prosopagnosia” or in other words “face blindness”. As the results of one test, show patients with prosopagnosia did as well as patients without when they were asked to differentiate highly dissimilar objects. However, when it came to learn a set of faces, patients with prosopagnosia showed lower results compare to group without disorder.
“What we wanted to do was to test a key prediction of the ‘expertise’ hypothesis,” said Constantin Rezlescu, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in psychology and the study’s first author.
“The expertise hypothesis predicts that when there is impairment in facial processing, you should also see impairment in processing other objects of expertise, because if the mechanisms are the same, any damage should affect both faces and other objects. Our findings, however, show a clear dissociation between participants’ ability to recognize faces and their ability to recognize other objects.”
In order to overcome this disorder, the researchers trained two prosopagnosia patients to become “experts” and there has been created computer-generated objects, called “greebles,” could be grouped into “families” based on their body. To sort greebles, Rezlescu explained, “…participants must detect those