Why Faces of Other Races Look Alike |The Brain, Memorizing & Remembering Faces | LiveScience

The brain works differently when memorizing the face of a person from one's own race than when attempting to remember the face of someone of another race, new biological evidence suggests.

The well-documented "other-race effect" finds that people are less likely to remember a face from a racial group different from their own. Northwestern University researchers set out to determine what causes this rift in perception and memory by using electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings, which measure brain activity, while participants viewed photos of various faces.

The researchers found that brain activity increases in the very first 200 to 250 milliseconds when seeing both same-race and other-race faces. Previous research has associated this very early phase, known as the N200 brain potential, with the perceptual process of individuation. That process involves making out the unique facial features of each person, such as the shape of their eyes and nose.

Read more: Why Faces of Other Races Look Alike |The Brain, Memorizing & Remembering Faces | LiveScience

Facial recognition at first glance: Humans and monkeys perceive faces of kin immediately

We meet a multitude of people on a daily basis: the nice waitress in the coffee shop around the corner, the bus driver or the colleagues at the office. Without the ability to recognize faces at first glance we would not be able to distinguish between people. Monkeys also possess the remarkable ability to differentiate faces of group members and to extract the relevant information about the individual directly from the face

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Facial recognition at first glance: Humans and monkeys perceive faces of kin immediately

Face Recognition: The Eyes Have It

Our brain extracts important information for face recognition principally from the eyes, and secondly from the mouth and nose, according to a new study from a researcher at the University of Barcelona. This result was obtained by analyzing several hundred face images in a way similar to that of the brain.

Read more:Face Recognition: The Eyes Have It: "Our brain extracts important information for face recognition principally from the eyes, and secondly from the mouth and nose, according to a new study from a researcher at the University of Barcelona. This result was obtained by analyzing several hundred face images in a way similar to that of the brain."

Brain Region Used In Face Recognition Is Active In New Object Recognition

The brain region critical in face perception is also active when humans become expert in recognizing a set of unknown, novel objects, according to a new study by researchers at Yale University Medical School and Brown University.

Read more:Brain Region Used In Face Recognition Is Active In New Object Recognition

Finding a Face in the Crowd : Discovery News

Tracy Staedter chats with face recognition expert Rob Jenkins, department of psychology at the University of Glasgow, Scotland.javascript:void(0)

Finding a Face in the Crowd : Discovery News: "Tracy Staedter chats with face recognition expert Rob Jenkins, department of psychology at the University of Glasgow, Scotland."

The Nose Knows: Two Fixation Points Needed For Face Recognition

Many of us are bad at remembering names but we are very quick to point out that at least we never forget a face. Never mind recognizing a familiar face- how is it that we recognize faces at all? Facial recognition is so automatic that we do not think about how our brain actually perceives a face.

The Nose Knows: Two Fixation Points Needed For Face Recognition

The fusiform face area: a cortical region specialized for the perception of faces

Paper by: Nancy Kanwisher and Galit Yovel. 2006

Faces are among the most important visual stimuli we perceive, informing us not only about a person's identity, but also about their mood, sex, age and direction of gaze. The ability to extract this information within a fraction of a second of viewing a face is important for normal social interactions and has probably played a critical role in the survival of our primate ancestors. Considerable evidence from behavioural, neuropsychological and neurophysiological investigations supports the hypothesis that humans have specialized cognitive and neural mechanisms dedicated to the perception of faces (the face-specificity hypothesis). Here, we review the literature on a region of the human brain that appears to play a key role in face perception, known as the fusiform face area (FFA).

Read more: The fusiform face area: a cortical region specialized for the perception of faces