Identifying the dimensions used by the primate brain to decode faces

Re:Identifying the dimensions used by the primate brain to d... by curun1r on Sunday June 04, 2017 @01:35PM (#14482515)

I remember reading about a study [1] that showed that humans recognize faces based on how similar they are to the faces of their parents. It's well known that humans are more easily able to differentiate faces within our own races. But what the study did was look at people who were adopted by parents of a different race. Those people were more easily able to differentiate faces of people of the same race as their adopted parents and had difficulty differentiating faces of people of their own race. The inference is that we actually store/recognize facial deltas, not full facial images.

I'm curious how this study would explain or contradict the results of that study. Also, were the monkeys raised by monkey parents or human scientists? Monkeys that were allowed to imprint on humans might be more similar to humans and, yet, unrepresentative of monkeys.

[1] I think it was https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15943669

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Re:Identifying the dimensions used by the primate brain to d... by anothercomment on Monday June 05, 2017 @01:57AM (#14485515)

Hm, I always guessed that the brain simply goes by a kind of "maximum information gain" approach, picking out the features that tend stick out most to distinguish things. If unused to, skin color sticks out extremely, so the signal it generates would drown out the other signals.

But that is just a guess and might also go against the findings of the article, which I haven't fully understood yet.

In any case it seems to me that the brain is optimized for processing certain features, as apparently there are people who are unable to recognize faces (face blindness).

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