Face Recognition: Context-Dependant?

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26 Nov 2014, 4:25 pm

Thanks, B19.

That was quite interesting---especially the part about "assumption"--the fusiform gyrus supposedly being at the center of recognizing faces.

And also a lesson about taking other variables into account within studies.

dianthus
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26 Nov 2014, 5:14 pm

B19 wrote:

I will try to elaborate for you. For a long time, it was thought that a particular region of the brain was specialised for recognising faces...

Thanks for posting this! Fascinating stuff. I didn't know about any of that.

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26 Nov 2014, 10:03 pm

eric76 wrote:

The term is prosopagnosia. It is generally thought to be due to problems in the right fusiform gyrus of the brain.

I have a great many problems with it. I can recognize people I work with every day at work. I may or may not recognize them elsewhere. I don't know of anyone who I would recognize if I was walking down the street in some remote city, say Duluth, Minnesota, and encountered them.

It is a bit easier if it is a couple since there is twice the information.

One of my primary means of recognizing people is their voice. If I was walking down the street in Duluth, Minnesota and encountered someone I know and they spoke to me, I would typically recognize them relatively fast.

I don't even recognize family members if they don't say anything and I encounter them where I don't expect to encounter them. Once when I was twenty, I asked my younger brother if he knew where I could find my younger brother. The question really surprised him. As soon as he said something, I recognized him.

At one previous job, I often went to the airport to pick people up and drive them back to my office. That included not only the president of the company and other employees, but also big investors in the company. Since I couldn't recognize them, I would stand near where they came off of the airplane and watch to see who would recognize me. Since I couldn't recognize them, it was up to them to recognize me.

If I'm in a store with someone, I tend to get really upset if we get separated because I don't know if I will be able to recognize them again -- usually they have the same hair style and clothing as when we entered the store and that really helps. But there have been a number of occasions where I would walk very quickly up and down the aisles watching carefully every time I crossed an aisle to see if I could find them in the aisles.

I have no recollection of what my parents looked like. Or my grandparents. I do have a picture of my parents and I know they are my parents when I see the picture, but it is essentially the picture I recognize, not the people in it.

So my primary methods of recognizing people is by context and voice. After that, in no particular order, is hair style, clothing, height, girth, mannerisms, and gait.

I noticed you mentioned Duluth Minnesota a couple of times. That's my favorite little city in the whole wide world

. I lived there for a few years. Beautiful country. :heart:

eric76
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26 Nov 2014, 11:10 pm

B19 wrote:

eric76 wrote:

B19 wrote:

It used to be thought that this was due to a deficit in part of the visual cortex at the back of the brain. Recent neuroscience has disproved that theory - and that's all it was - a theory that was wrong.

Context is an issue. It is also thought that a large part of the issue with face recognition is that ASD people spend less time looking at and therefore remembering faces.

I cannot imagine why it would have thought to have anything to do with the visual cortex.

There is a good deal of evidence at present to think that it is due to damage to or a developmental problem with the right fusiform gyrus. It is certainly far more than an issue of not spending enough time looking at and remembering faces.

I will try to elaborate for you. For a long time, it was thought that a particular region of the brain was specialised for recognising faces - and nothing else but faces - and that this was the fusiform gyrus which is a cluster of neurons in the visual cortex. Several studies concluded (erronerously) that "this must be damaged in autism". Subsequent studies showed something very different: that the fusiform gyrus responds to something in the visual field in which the observer has intense interest - bird watching, for example. So how did scientists get their earlier conclusion, in the early 1990s, so wrong?

Cites?

The fusiform gyrus is near the bottom of the brain The visual cortex is at the lower back portion of the brain. They are very near each other, but I don't think it true that the fusiform gyrus is part of the visual cortex. Perhaps you can provide cites for this, too.

While the notion that the fusiform gyrus is responsible has had its skeptics, my understanding is that recent research is finding stronger indications that the primary area of the brain responsible for the recognition of faces does lie in the right fusiform gyrus.

Quote:

...

I cut out the part about autistic kids because I seriously doubt that it is important except that it could indicate that some of the increased frequencey of having trouble recognizing faces by Autistic children may be at least partially due to inattentiveness. That some test subjects may be inattentive seems to me to indicate that they aren't a good choice for subjects.

You are aware, aren't you, that prosopagnosia is hardly limited to the Autistic.

Quote:

There are more recent studies on how important context can be, which (if you really want to know) I will try to locate for you when I get time.

I'm quite aware that context can be important, but feel free to provide the citations. But that does not seem likely to be able to refute the research that the fusiform gyrus is primarily responsible for facial recognition.

While the issue could hardly be considered to be settled, I think that recent research tends to support the role of the right fusiform gyrus in processing faces.

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26 Nov 2014, 11:12 pm

kraftiekortie wrote:

It's not an assumption.

I would term it a conjecture that is increasingly supported by current research.

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26 Nov 2014, 11:21 pm

yournamehere wrote:

I noticed you mentioned Duluth Minnesota a couple of times. That's my favorite little city in the whole wide world

. I lived there for a few years. Beautiful country. :heart:

The closest I've been to Duluth is Minneapolis and St Paul, but it is one part of the country that I would really like to visit. Mainly the area to the northeast of Duluth toward Lutsen and Grand Marais.

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26 Nov 2014, 11:53 pm

For me it's the only way to make sense of it all. I'm terrible with most faces, unless they have distinct features.

I've learned to work around it by memorizing tone of voice as well as placing people in context. And I seem to remember names in general well, so that often helps me a bit.

In fact; it's quite common for me to be out in the mall, run into friends or family (including my parents) see them waving at me and I have no clue who it was, pretty much assuming that "they must be people I know". Now, since my mom is rolling around in a wheelchair and my dad is with her, that kinda makes up context nowadays, but the times I ran into either of them on their own from a distance... nope.

And the same applies for being at home. We live here with 3 people (me, my mom and dad). So it's kinda obvious who is who I guess. Elderly woman is my mom, elderly man is my dad...

It's funny since family (like aunts) accused me of being stuck up for not saying hi when I run into them. Well, I didn't run into them, I walked past them... so to me they're total strangers.

THe weird part for me is; there are plenty of faces I recognize. I have no issue with plenty of actors for some reason. But perhaps they're partially actors, and famous, because they have distinct mugs. That often lead to hilarious conversations in school like "why is Steven Spielberg teaching us about inflation?" (and for some reason people never considered that teacher to have some features of Spielberg, but the moment I dropped that idea, people can't unsee the similarities... and that's quite funny and a talent all by itself I guess; picking up tiny details within the bigger picture of a face only to link the sum of these features together to another, more known face. It's also why I always went with "oh... it's Spielbergs class" instead of said teachers actual name).

Me and faces is terrible; I once had the cops at my house for describing the guy across the street. They were so utterly confused that I could not give a proper description besides "he has a mullet and he was white".

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27 Nov 2014, 12:03 am

eric76 wrote:

yournamehere wrote:

I noticed you mentioned Duluth Minnesota a couple of times. That's my favorite little city in the whole wide world

. I lived there for a few years. Beautiful country. :heart:

Yes yes. North shore. Very nice.

I am a firm believer that your mind only sees what it wants to see. Don't really care what part, or if their even is a part of the mind that "picks up faces". Your eyes see, (or project) everything. A camera sees less, but this is how you view everything, so it "sees", or "projects" the same. the reason I say project, is because that is what it is. The camera just takes stuff in. It doesn't view anything. Everything is, and needs to be similar, or you do not understand what it is, and you do not "see" anything. Like the blind guy that gets his eyes fixed. They work perfectly, he knows something is different. He knows something is there, but he is still blind. There is nothing to relate. No differentiation. It is just a blur. If you see something the same way every day, it becomes familiar. If it changes, it is not even the same thing, until you find similarities. It is no different than camouflage, costumes for holloween, or shape shifting. All people have a problem like this.

According to some, having a third eye is a different sight all together. I had to throw that out there because it is weird, and mysterious.

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27 Nov 2014, 12:12 am

King_oni wrote:

Me and faces is terrible; I once had the cops at my house for describing the guy across the street. They were so utterly confused that I could not give a proper description besides "he has a mullet and he was white".

I've often wondered what would happen if I was asked to identify someone in a police lineup. Unless I knew the person well, I wouldn't have a chance. Even knowing the person well, I might not be able to identify them.

I would be even less useful trying to describe them to a police sketch office.

By the way, my mother passed away a couple of years ago and had suffered from increasingly more serious Alzheimer's. It reached the point that there were only three or four people who she could reliably identify. My younger brother's oldest son was not among them and it really upset him that she no longer knew who he was.

I really don't understand why he was so upset. I wonder what he would say if he knew that I readily confuse him with his brother if they are not standing together. Or that I cannot tell the difference between his two boys if they are not standing together so that I can see which of the two is taller. Or that when I see his daughter, I'm sometimes unsure if it is her unless she speaks.

Even with people I know pretty well, it often comes down to guessing. One day one of my best friends in town drove by me in the alley behind the office and I wondered who was driving his pickup.

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27 Nov 2014, 12:18 am

eric76 wrote:

I would be even less useful trying to describe them to a police sketch office.

When I see people do that in movies, I'm flabbergasted. I would be hard pressed to recall the most obvious things, like whether a person was tall or short.

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27 Nov 2014, 12:23 am

yournamehere wrote:

eric76 wrote:

yournamehere wrote:

I noticed you mentioned Duluth Minnesota a couple of times. That's my favorite little city in the whole wide world

. I lived there for a few years. Beautiful country. :heart:

Yes yes. North shore. Very nice.

I am a firm believer that your mind only sees what it wants to see. Don't really care what part, or if their even is a part of the mind that "picks up faces".

There are people who never forget a face even if they just passed each other only once years before. There was nothing conscious about it.

In my case, it really doesn't matter how hard I try to memorize a face. I can't. It takes me forever to be able to recognize a face and if someone changes in the process (say new hair style or changed from glasses to contacts) I have to start over.

However, there was one odd incident about twenty years ago. I was driving across Oklahoma and stopped at a convenience store for a coke and a candy bar. While standing in line looking at the back of the head of the person in front of me and with no other clues at all, I recognized him as my cousin who lives about 60 miles away from that town. There was no reason why I would expect to see him there. For that matter, it was the only time I was ever in that town and I would hardly expect to run into anyone I knew. On the other hand, when I see his face, it is a tossup whether or not I will recognize him unless he speaks.

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27 Nov 2014, 12:26 am

Sometimes I think I remember hair patterns better than faces. So looking at the back of someone's head I may recognize them immediately.

eric76
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27 Nov 2014, 12:26 am

By the way, when I cut my hair, I cut it quite short and then let it grow for a long time before the next haircut. One reason for this is that when it is short, I have trouble recognizing myself in a mirror (and then I only recognize myself because I know that I'm the one standing in front of the mirror) but as it starts to grow out I learn to recognize myself again by the hair and then the day to day growth is not very distinguishable.

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27 Nov 2014, 12:28 am

dianthus wrote:

Sometimes I think I remember hair patterns better than faces. So looking at the back of someone's head I may recognize them immediately.

In my cousin's case it was rather thin, short red hair and the rosy coloration of his skin. His height also helped as well.

B19
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27 Nov 2014, 1:27 am

sorry, double post.

Last edited by B19 on 27 Nov 2014, 1:28 am, edited 1 time in total.

B19
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27 Nov 2014, 1:27 am

Some research citations regarding different findings:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15219586

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16477517

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