Recognition of Faces: Researchers Probe More On How Brain Comprehends Human Faces

The human brain is able to recognize objects within a small fraction of time usually milliseconds, even though it receives just a hazy information. Scientists of Goethe University have confirmed that the brain is constantly making predictions about objects coming in its view and then compares it with incoming information.

They have reported in a recent edition of the Journal of Neuroscience that the activity of brain waves going to higher brain increases when it makes predictive errors prior during matching process.

The researchers started showing them Mooney faces, named after their inventor Craig Mooney, to inculcate predictive errors in their selected sample, as written in Science Daily. These faces were completely converted into their black and white form.These photographs of faces are easily recognizable and comprehensible. People can even predict information regarding age, gender and facial expression from black and white faces.

There were two shortcomings of this Mooney faces. Firstly, faces were oriented upright and secondly, a light comes from above. "The performance was, therefore, slower and poorer" Professor Michael Wibral from the Brain Imaging Center at the Goethe University explained.

MIT researchers have developed a new model of face recognition mechanism of the human brain. This new computational model seems to include some aspects that were not considered by previous models regarding human neurology, as written in MIT news section. They made a machine learning system where they were fed a sample of images to the system and trained to recognize it.

They found a new property that was not being programmed into a system that the trained system represented an intermediate processing step, where facial rotation of 45 degrees but not necessarily left or right was represented. But this system showed similar results to an observed feature of primate face-processing mechanism. This gave an indication that their system and brain acts similarly.

There has not been a complete information regarding brain's comprehensibility of human faces but researchers and scientists are trying to find the mechanism by programming models and training samples for testing.