Are faces special?

Brain damage can produce problems in face recognition - even own reflection (Bodamer, 1947) Prosopagnosia usually results from localized brain damage Prosopagnosia

Farah (1990) reported that 94% of prosopagnosia patients had damage in the right hemisphere Damage usually occurs in the ventral occipital or temporal lobes. This led to the idea of a face-specific module that resides in the right ventral occipitotemporal regions of the brain Prosopagnosia

The Thatcher Illusion

Features analysed independently Each feature coded relative to gravity

Humans are most attuned to upright faces Yin (1970) studied patients with Right hemisphere damage Recognition test with pictures of faces and houses Items presented upright and upside down R hemisphere patients did as well as normal subjects in recognising inverted faces, but were worse at recognising upright faces The inversion effect

Yin’s interpretation = when faces are upright they are processed by special mechanism in the right hemisphere Faces presented upside down do not stimulate this mechanism and are treated like objects The inversion effect

First face detection cells were discovered by Gross et al (1972) Monkey temporal cortex Cells did not respond to simple stimuli nor to other complex objects Face detection cells

Brain activity - Faces vs. objects FFA – fusiform face area From FMRI in awake humans