| Title | Mechanisms of face perception. | | Author(s) | Tsao DY, Livingstone MS | | Institution | Centers for Advanced Imaging and Cognitive Sciences, Bremen University, D-28334 Bremen, Germany. doris@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu | | Source | Annu Rev Neurosci 2008.:411-37. | | Abstract | Faces are among the most informative stimuli we ever perceive: Even a split-second glimpse of a person's face tells us his identity, sex, mood, age, race, and direction of attention. The specialness of face processing is acknowledged in the artificial vision community, where contests for face-recognition algorithms abound. Neurological evidence strongly implicates a dedicated machinery for face processing in the human brain to explain the double dissociability of face- and object-recognition deficits. Furthermore, recent evidence shows that macaques too have specialized neural machinery for processing faces. Here we propose a unifying hypothesis, deduced from computational, neurological, fMRI, and single-unit experiments: that what makes face processing special is that it is gated by an obligatory detection process. We clarify this idea in concrete algorithmic terms and show how it can explain a variety of phenomena associated with face processing. | | Language | eng | | Pub Type(s) | Journal Article
| | PubMed ID | 18558862 |
|
