Auto experts recognize cars like most people recognize faces

When people – and monkeys – look at faces, a special part of their brain that is about the size of a blueberry “lights up.” Now, the most detailed brain-mapping study of the area yet conducted has confirmed that it isn’t limited to processing faces, as some experts have maintained, but instead serves as a general center of expertise for visual recognition.

Neuroscientists previously established that this region, which is called the fusiform face area (FFA) and is located in the temporal lobe, is responsible for a particularly effective form of visual recognition. But there has been an ongoing debate about whether this area is hard-wired to recognize faces because of their importance to us or if it is a more general mechanism that allows us to rapidly recognize objects that we work with extensively.

In the new study published this week in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of Vanderbilt researchers report that they have recorded the activity in the FFAs of a group of automobile aficionados at extremely high resolution using one the most powerful MRI scanners available for human use and found no evidence that there is a special area devoted exclusively to facial recognition. Instead, they found that the FFA of the auto experts was filled with small, interspersed patches that respond strongly to photos of faces and autos both.

Humans aren’t the only animals who possess special skills with mugs

Paper wasps aren’t mammals, or even vertebrates. Before this study, the notion that a creature so distant from humankind in the tree of life could possess face expertise was weirder than an upside-down Darwin. Now the wasp development has added some sizzle to the endeavor of establishing what face-perception abilities other creatures may actually have. Emerging patterns in the animal world may reveal what drives the evolution of remarkable face prowess.

“The search is on,” says neuroscientist Winrich Freiwald of Rockefeller University in New York City.

While some researchers continue to invent tests (and debate how to interpret test results) for probing facial aptitudes among humankind’s primate cousins, other efforts have pushed beyond primates. Sheep, as well as those paper wasps, appear to have some special face skills. And faces may be important among rodents in ways that demand a more ticklish view of what face perception means. When it comes to face smarts, researchers are finding that the size of an animal’s brain may not matter as much as the company it keeps.

Cross a crow and it’ll remember you for years. Crows and humans share the ability to recognize faces and associate them with negative, as well as positive, feelings. The way the brain activates during that process is something the two species also appear to share, according to new research being published this week.

"The regions of the crow brain that work together are not unlike those that work together in mammals, including humans," said John Marzluff, University of Washington professor of environmental and forest sciences. "These regions were suspected to work in birds but not documented until now.

"For example it appears that birds have a region of their brain that is analogous to the amygdala of mammals," he said. "The amygdala is the region of the vertebrate brain where negative associations are stored as memories. Previous work primarily concerned its function in mammals while our work shows that a similar system is at work in birds. Our approach could be used in other animals – such as lizards and frogs – to see if the process is similar in those vertebrates as well."

Marzluff is the lead author of a paper being published the week of Sept. 10 in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.