( Suppose you are on a stroll and you bu...)The Brain behind Facial Recognition,Health

Suppose, you are on a stroll and you bump into a grey-haired man, you just cant miss, and instantly, you exclaim 'hello, Mr. Clinton…', Your day// is made, no doubt, but have you considered the brain behind the ability of instant facial recognition ? Neurobiologists have long been intrigued by this fact, and some of them even assume that brains accord a special treatment to faces!

Research into this topic also suggested that there may even be particular neurons acclimatized to the identity of one particular person. The theory also supposes that these neurons lie in the "fusiform face area," which is triggered into action when there is a facial encounter.

However, the most recent research ,in the April 6, 2006 issue of Neuron, Maximilian Riesenhuber of Georgetown University Medical Center and his colleagues (Jiang et al.) have discovered evidence for a theory that the FFA, instead, contains tightly integrated circuitry that recognizes faces based on selective processing of shapes of facial features.

In their studies, the researchers first constructed a computational model that represented how their hypothesized neuronal circuitry would work. This model aimed at predicting how the circuitry could give rise to the perception of faces. Such perception includes the shape of specific features--eyes, noses, and mouths--as well as the "configuration" of those features--their position on the face.

The researchers found that their model captured such aspects of face perception, even though the circuitry in their model had not explicitly coded them. To demonstrate that their model could also account for how other neuronal circuitry could be similarly tuned to other objects, they also tested how it might behave when it encountered images of cars. They found that model worked just as well to produce the same recognition characteristics as in faces.

Riesenhuber and his colleagues tested their "shape-based" model experime
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