Thursday, April 2, 2009
Decoding the vocabulary the brain uses to recognize faces
Why are human beings able to recognize people in pictures but unable to do that when a negative of the same photo is put before them? According to Professor Pawan Sinha of the Sinha Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), that's because the brain uses certain codes to recognize faces. His study, done with two other researchers at MIT, has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the second week of March, and has the potential for many medical and non-medical uses in fields such as autism and identification technology.
"The starting point for this work is an observation many of us are familiar with – that when we look at a negative it is hard to recognize who are the people," Sinha told News India-Times. "The question is – why is it so hard – because all of the information is in that negative – I can produce a positive without any additional information. But somehow the brain is unable to make use of that information and its recognition performance is severely compromised."
Sinha's earlier research into light and dark relationships between different parts of the face, showed that in most cases when there was normal light around, a person's eyes appeared darker than the forehead and cheeks.
To read the full article, click here..
To read the ePaper, visit: http://www.newsindia-times.com
"The starting point for this work is an observation many of us are familiar with – that when we look at a negative it is hard to recognize who are the people," Sinha told News India-Times. "The question is – why is it so hard – because all of the information is in that negative – I can produce a positive without any additional information. But somehow the brain is unable to make use of that information and its recognition performance is severely compromised."
Sinha's earlier research into light and dark relationships between different parts of the face, showed that in most cases when there was normal light around, a person's eyes appeared darker than the forehead and cheeks.
To read the full article, click here..
To read the ePaper, visit: http://www.newsindia-times.com
Labels: brain, brain encodes faces, brain uses certain codes to recognize faces, Decoding the vocabulary, human beings, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, photo negatives, Professor Pawan Sinha
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