A face is not a fish
When it comes to recognizing faces, humans are extraordinarily skillful. It’s no surprise — our brains are drawn to faces from the moment we leave the womb, and the average person sees hundreds of thousands of them over the course of a lifetime. Among scientists, however, questions of mechanics remain divisive. Some researchers point to operations specialized just for faces. Others argue that the ability to recognize faces relies on the same brain mechanisms used in other areas of visual expertise — in recognizing birds or fish, for example. Using tests conducted with patients suffering from prosopagnosia, or “face blindness,” Harvard and Dartmouth researchers have taken a step toward resolving the dispute. As part of the study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, patients with prosopagnosia matched controls in distinguishing between highly similar exemplars of new objects. However, when asked to learn a set of faces under...