While scientists have long known that the parts of your body that you can move or feel are represented in your brain's outer layer in "maps," a team of researchers at Aalto University have discovered that the same is true of other people's faces, which could help explain the differences in facial recognition abilities in certain people, according to the New Scientist.
The team scanned 12 participants' brains while they looked at hundreds of different kinds of images ranging from noses and eyes to various other facial features, all the while recording activation levels in their brains. The results showed that a specific region of the occipital face area, a region of the brain that is involved in facial processing, is organized into a representation of the features of the human face, a map that the team refers to as "faciotopy." These features parallel the actual features of the faces being observed in real-time, according to The Scientist.
"Facial recognition is so fundamental to human behavior that it makes sense that there would be a specialized area of the brain that maps features of the face," said Linda Henriksson, who led the research.
The discovery marks the first example of a brain map that is an accurate reflection of the topography and features of objects in our environment.
Brad Duchaine of Darthmouth College, who did not participate in the research, believes that the finding could help scientists better understand difficulties in face processing, such as the deficits seen in those with prosopagnosia, which is the inability to recognize the faces of familiar people, according to Nature World News.
For most people, though, faces require very little brain processing in order for recognition to take place, so little that some people see faces that don't exist in their cereal and other unusual places.
"We can't help but see faces everywhere," said Winrich Freiwald, who studies face processing in the brain. "Face recognition is such an important mechanism that it's fooled by stimuli that resemble the two-eyes, nose and mouth combination."
The findings were published in the November issue of Cortex.
