A Dedicated System for Processing Faces
Essay title: A Dedicated System for Processing Faces
If youre planning to rob a bank, theres one thing you must not forget: to cover your face. Otherwise, just a brief glance will allow all the other social animals around you to identify you. What is the neural basis of the extraordinary ability of humans to recognize faces? Localized strokes can selectively destroy face recognition abilities while preserving the ability to recognize other objects (“prosopagnosia”) (1). Furthermore, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a technique that measures blood flow changes induced by brain activation, consistently reveals several discrete brain regions that respond more to faces than to other objects (2). One of these regions, the fusiform face area, shows increased blood flow even when subjects merely imagine faces (3). These findings suggest that face processing is mediated by specialized modules inside the human brain. Such specialization is surprising since, from introspection, it seems that our recognition of faces flows seamlessly into that of all the other objects in the world.
Are face-selective regions unique