Feb 16, 2010

What science can't describe.


If any object humans visually attend to more than any other, it is the human body. Besides the expression of the body in space and time it is only the expression of the face in time, what we can see. One remarkable neuroscientific line of research found special areas in the brain with more activity specifically to faces. Of those, the so-called fusiform face area on the right fusiform gyrus shows the most robust face selective activation . Further research also found face specific areas in the temporal lobe in monkeys using imaging technique. But moreover, at the single neuron level, they showed face specific tuning. Recently Freiwald et al. (2009) described a more detailed understanding of the mechanisms of face perception. They could show, that different neurons in the face area selectively respond to between one and four different facial features (among others the eyes, irises or eyebrows), and that their firing rate is tuned in average by three of 19 different stimulus dimensions, such as the distance between the eyes. 



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