Putting names to faces can sometimes be challenging, but humans are generally extremely good at recognising faces. Computers, on the other hand, often find it difficult to categorize a face as a face. Indeed, a major challenge in face recognition arises because faces come in many different shapes and sizes. Moreover, both the lighting conditions and the orientation of the head can change, which makes the challenge even more difficult. Young infants also show a preference for pictures of human faces over nonsense images, which suggests that the ability to recognise faces is at least partly hard-wired. Neuroimaging studies have revealed that face recognition depends on activity in specific regions of the right hemisphere of the brain, and adults who sustain damage to these regions lose their face recognition skills. De Heering and Rossion have now provided the first evidence that the right hemisphere is specialized for distinguishing between natural images of faces and ‘non-face objects’ in infants as young as 4 to 6 months. By using scalp electrodes to record electrical activity in the brain as the infants viewed images on a screen, De Heering and Rossion showed that photographs of human faces triggered a distinct pattern of electrical activity in the right hemisphere this pattern was clearly different to the patterns triggered by photographs of animals or objects. A consistent response was triggered by faces of different genders and expressions, and by faces presented from various viewpoints and under different lighting conditions. In a control experiment, De Heering and Rossion demonstrated that low-level visual features such as differences in luminance or contrast do not contribute to this selective response to faces. These results argue against the idea that face perception only becomes assigned to the right hemisphere of the brain when children learn to read (that is, when language processing begins to occupy parts of the left hemisphere). By generating significant responses in a short period of time (just five minutes or less), the protocol developed by De Heering and Rossion has the potential to prove very useful to researchers investigating developmental changes to the perception of visual images during childhood.
展开▼
机译：将名字贴在脸上有时可能具有挑战性，但是人类通常非常擅长识别面孔。另一方面，计算机经常发现很难将面部分类为面部。实际上，由于面部具有许多不同的形状和大小，因此出现了面部识别的主要挑战。而且，照明条件和头部的方向都可以改变，这使得挑战更加困难。与无意义的图像相比，年幼的婴儿也更喜欢人脸的图片，这表明识别脸部的能力至少部分是硬连线的。神经影像学研究表明，面部识别取决于大脑右半球特定区域的活动，对这些区域造成损害的成年人会丧失其面部识别能力。 De Heering和Rossion现在提供了第一个证据，证明右半球专门用于区分4到6个月婴儿的自然面孔图像和“非面孔物体”。当婴儿在屏幕上观看图像时，通过使用头皮电极记录大脑中的电活动，De Heering和Rossion表明，人脸的照片触发了右半球独特的电活动模式，该模式明显不同于触发的模式。通过动物或物体的照片拍摄。性别和表情各异的面孔，以及从不同角度和不同光照条件下呈现的面孔，引发了一致的反应。在对照实验中，De Heering和Rossion证明了诸如亮度或对比度差异之类的低级视觉特征不会对脸部做出选择性反应。这些结果与以下观念背道而驰：当孩子学习阅读时（即，当语言处理开始占据左半球的一部分时），面部感知只会分配给大脑的右半球。通过在短时间内（不到五分钟或更短时间内）产生显着响应，De Heering和Rossion开发的协议有潜力证明对研究儿童时期视觉图像感知的发展变化的研究人员非常有用。
展开▼
