By using this site, you agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Accept
Health Works CollectiveHealth Works CollectiveHealth Works Collective
  • Health
    • Mental Health
    Health
    Healthcare organizations are operating on slimmer profit margins than ever. One report in August showed that they are even lower than the beginning of the…
    Show More
    Top News
    follow these steps to recover from your injury
    What Steps Should You Take to Recover More Quickly from an Injury?
    April 12, 2022
    What Should You Ask Before Taking Herbal Supplements?
    What Should You Ask Before Taking Herbal Supplements?
    August 30, 2022
    take a vacation to bolster your health
    4 Reasons Why Going on Holiday Is Good for Your Health
    November 22, 2022
    Latest News
    Biohazard Cleanup: The Importance of Proper Disposal and Containment
    December 2, 2023
    Medicare Helps Seniors, and People with Disabilities & ESRD
    November 27, 2023
    The Link Between Allergies and Sinusitis & Strategies for Relief
    November 27, 2023
    What Health Complications Can a Sunburn Cause?
    November 22, 2023
  • Policy and Law
    • Global Healthcare
    • Medical Ethics
    Policy and Law
    Get the latest updates about Insurance policies and Laws in the Healthcare industry for different geographical locations.
    Show More
    Top News
    Target Knows You’re Pregnant, Even if No One Else Knows
    February 23, 2012
    Understanding The Appeal of Mini-Meds
    May 3, 2011
    Is it True What They Say About Fructose?
    March 15, 2012
    Latest News
    Automation in Pharmacovigilance: A Double-Edged Sword
    November 15, 2023
    What Does Science Say About Modern Health Practices?
    November 12, 2023
    Harnessing the Power of Email Marketing in Healthcare
    October 26, 2023
    10 Proven Strategies to Level Up Your Health Business
    October 25, 2023
  • Medical Innovations
  • News
  • Wellness
  • Tech
Search
© 2023 HealthWorks Collective. All Rights Reserved.
Reading: Recognize This Face?
Share
Sign In
Notification Show More
Font ResizerAa
Health Works CollectiveHealth Works Collective
Font ResizerAa
Search
Have an existing account? Sign In
Follow US
  • About
  • Contact
  • Privacy
© 2023 HealthWorks Collective. All Rights Reserved.
Health Works Collective > Technology > Recognize This Face?
Technology

Recognize This Face?

Dov Michaeli
Last updated: 2012/07/09 at 5:39 AM
Dov Michaeli
Share
9 Min Read
SHARE

I recently stumbled on a short BloombergBusinessWeek  news item that said, in part:

“Facebook Inc.  (FB), owner of the world’s largest social-networking website, last month acquired Face.com, the Israeli maker of technology that helps users tag photos and find images online by distinguishing facial features.

I recently stumbled on a short BloombergBusinessWeek  news item that said, in part:

“Facebook Inc.  (FB), owner of the world’s largest social-networking website, last month acquired Face.com, the Israeli maker of technology that helps users tag photos and find images online by distinguishing facial features.

Israel, whose population of 7.8 million is similar in size to Switzerland’s, has about 60 companies traded on the Nasdaq Stock Market, the most of any country outside the U.S. after China. The nation is also home to more startup companies per capita than the U.S. ”

Apart from the business aspect of article, the fascinating thing to me was the automation of face recognition.

How important is face recognition to our survival? Apparently very important; in fact, so important that certain areas in the brain are dedicated to this task. You can lose your memory to buildings, places, other items -but your facial recognition would stay intact.

Why was it so important to dedicate a brain area to this task? As always, think survival. It was extremely important that a person would recognize the individuals around him. One of them may be his foe. Other animals that depend on social interaction for their survival, such as monkeys and apes and probably dogs, have this capacity as well.

There are people who lost their capacity to recognize faces. It could be due to a stroke, or genetic. The condition is called prosopagnosia (prosop=face, agnosia=no-knowledge, in Greek). Fortunately, in modern society these people not marked for extinction. To wit: Paul Dirac, a physicist and Nobel Prize laureate has it. So does Jane Godall, the famous primatologist who studied family and social interactions among chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania. And Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who described the most bizarre neurological cases (The Man who mistook His Wife for a Hat) discovered that he suffered from hereditary prosopagnosia when he complained about recognizing faces and his family told him that his brothers suffered from the same thing. Its heritability was documented in a paper in the Proceedings of  the National Academy of Sciences (Human face recognition ability is specific and highly heritable).

 As we can see, they all function quite well in modern society. They do it by associating a person with ancillary traits, like gait, voice, speech, clothes, etc.

How do we remember faces?

Carnegie Mellon University’s Marlene Behrmann, David Plaut and Adrian Nestor have discovered that an entire network of cortical areas work together to identify faces. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), participants were shown images of faces while in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner. Their task was to recognize different facial identities with varying facial expressions. Using dynamic multivariate mapping, the research team examined the functional MRI (fMRI) data and found a network of fusiform and anterior temporal regions that respond with distinct patterns to different identities. Furthermore, they found that the information is evenly distributed among the anterior regions and that the right fusiform region plays a central role within the network.

 

fusiform gyrus, in red . (Source: Wikipedia)

If face recognition was so important to survival, wouldn’t you expect a subconscious brain circuit that would allow for quick reaction to threat? Indeed, scientists from the Netherlands ( B. de Gelder) and Oxford University (J. S. Morris and R.J. Dolan) described  in an article in the PNAS(Unconscious fear influences emotional awareness of faces and voices) showed that the amygdala and the pulvinar, both centers in the midbrain mediating “primitive” emotions such as fear, became active even when people with “face blindness” were shown a frightening face. Which proves that face recognition in controlled on two levels: conscious and unconscious. What better proof that recognizing faces is a question of life and death?

I can recognize them a mile away

It is easy to recognize a black person from a white one, or a Chinese from a Caucasian. But how about Burmese from Filipino? Any Filipino or Burmese person would do it with out difficulty, but can an average American? Or, on a more touchy subject, can you tell a gay from a straight person by their face? Gays recognize each other by what they call gaydar, which is a portmanteau (contraction) of two words: gay and radar. Is there something to it? In a recent paper in PLoS ONE Joshua A. Tabak and Vivian Zayas present evidence that indeed gaydar exists.

Participants viewed facial photographs of men and women and then categorized each face as gay or straight. The photographs were seen very briefly, for 50 milliseconds, which was long enough for participants to know they’d seen a face, but probably not long enough to feel they knew much more. In addition, the photos were mostly devoid of cultural cues: hairstyles were digitally removed, and no faces had makeup, piercings, eyeglasses or tattoos.

Even when viewing such bare faces so briefly, participants demonstrated an ability to identify sexual orientation: overall, gaydar judgments were about 60 percent accurate, statistically significant. Bear in mind: this was recognition limited to facial features only; mannerisms, tone of voice, gait -all could complement and enhance recognition of gay people.

 

Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the gayest of them all? (Source: Science Daily)

But the researchers didn’t stop there. In another experiment, they found above-chance gaydar accuracy even when the faces were presented upside down. Accuracy increased, however, when the faces were presented right side up. as the authors explain in a New York Times article  it’s widely accepted in cognitive science that when viewing faces right side up, we process them in two different ways: we engage in featural face processing (registering individual facial features like an eye or lip) as well as configural face processing (registering spatial relationships among facial features, like the distance between the eyes or the facial width-to-height ratio). When we view faces upside down, however, we engage primarily in featural face processing; configural face processing is strongly disrupted. Their discovery — that accuracy was substantially greater for right side up faces than for upside-down faces — indicates that configural face processing contributes to gaydar accuracy. Specific facial features will not tell the whole story. Differences in spatial relationships among facial features matter, too.

Now we can close the loop: remember the opening story about the Israeli company , Face.com, that Facebook acquired? their computer program is based on featural and configural features of face recognition. Why would Facebook want to distinguish gays from straights? Intriguing, but that’s a subject for another post.

 

 

 

TAGGED: facial recognition

Sign Up For Daily Newsletter

Be keep up! Get the latest breaking news delivered straight to your inbox.
By signing up, you agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe at any time.
Dov Michaeli July 9, 2012 July 9, 2012
Share This Article
Facebook Twitter Copy Link Print
Share
Previous Article Pay for Performance Attacks Medical Quality: Lincoln Lucks Out
Next Article Personalized Prevention, Part IV

Stay Connected

1.5k Followers Like
4.5k Followers Follow
2.8k Followers Pin
136k Subscribers Subscribe

Latest News

weight loss
The Key Steps For Affective Weight Loss And Improving Health
Weight Loss Wellness December 6, 2023
Empowering Wellness: HBOT for Home Use Demystified
Empowering Wellness: HBOT for Home Use Demystified
Wellness December 5, 2023
Invasive Dentistry
Precision And Comfort: The Role Of Lasers In Minimally Invasive Dentistry
Dental health Specialties December 4, 2023
sublingual immunotherapy
Sublingual Immunotherapy: A Safe and Effective Alternative to Allergy Shots
Allergy Specialties December 2, 2023

You Might also Like

Medical Device Concept Development Paving the Way for Healthcare Innovations
Medical Devices

Medical Device Concept Development: Paving the Way for Healthcare Innovations

December 2, 2023
healthcare business website
Technology

Choosing the Right Domain Name for Your Healthcare Business

November 27, 2023
healthcare software development
Technology

Shaping the Future of Healthcare Software Development

November 23, 2023
Modern Health Practices
Medical Innovations

What Does Science Say About Modern Health Practices?

November 12, 2023
Subscribe

Subscribe to our newsletter to get our newest articles instantly!

Follow US
© 2008-2023 HealthWorks Collective. All Rights Reserved.
  • About
  • Contact
  • Privacy
Welcome Back!

Sign in to your account

Lost your password?