Summary: A recent study suggests that the head may be trained to recognize faces by instinct. Researchers found that cells in the hippocampus of one-week-old birds, which had never seen eyes before, responded to face-like designs of three lines resembling eye and a mouth.
These findings point to an innate, certainly acquired ability to recognize faces, which may explain why people perceive faces in things like walls and clouds. The outcomes challenge past theories that only through practice can create face recognition.
Important Facts:
- Cells in kid chicks ‘ brains respond to face-like designs, supporting inherent face recognition.
- According to the study, animal brains are born with a predisposition to acknowledge face-like shapes.
- This innate system may even explain prosopagnosia, seeing faces in inanimate things.
Origin: University of Trento
Is it innate for both the animals ‘ and humans ‘ brains to recognize faces? Does this ability result from an inherent genetic mechanism?
On the other side of the coin, those who believe mouth reputation is a skill that can be learned through experience and exposure to heads, and those who believe it is naturally predisposed in the head, are all engaged in debates that have been fueling these topics.
A recent study by a research team at the University of Trento’s Center for Mind and Brain Sciences ( CIMEC ) has contributed to the discussion.
A community of cells that respond to a face-like signal, consisting of three lines that mirror two vision and a mouth, were found in one-week-old birds that have never been exposed to heads.
Pets do not react to specialized facial functions or dots that are organized disorderly and do not understand physical characteristics. According to the results, face recognition is intrinsic.  ,
The study has been published in , PNAS.  ,
About the research.
Many behavioral studies suggest that the brain’s ability to select faces may be inherent. Never-before-seen faces in human newborns and newly-hatched chicks exhibit spontaneous attraction to these stimuli, which are made up of three obscure features, including an eye and a mouth ( or a beak ).
However, the neurological system of this inherent predisposition was unfamiliar.
Baby babies respond to designs that resemble schematized faces, according to studies conducted by UniTrento’s exploration team. A community of cells in a particular area of the brain was able to identify the response. It is referred to as the” caudolateral nidopallium” and is thought to be the mammalian prefrontal cortex’s avian equivalent.
The study was conducted in the Sheep Consciousness and Neuroscience (ACN) Laboratory at Cimec, directed by Giorgio Vallortigara, who explains:
” We performed a series of power experiments using graphic eyes in which the attributes were shuffled, displaced, or arranged in all possible combinations. And these cells appear to simply react to faces. This suggests that the awareness to faces is definitely inherent in animals ‘ neurons.
Another exciting aspect of the research is the performance of this awareness, which explains, for instance, why sometimes we see eyes in the sky or in places on the windows, a trend that is known as “pareidolia”.
” This psychic process”, says Vallortigara, “results from a certain mental process. This straightforward set of pixels arranged in the right places is obviously what our brains are wired to do. These are impulses that are unique to characteristics.
The simplest way for neurons to indicate something that looks like a face is that there are no diagram faces in the world. Therefore, a newborn baby or a kitten chick will be drawn to these three-dimensional stimuli and will be able to understand the mother’s facial characteristics over time and set them apart from those of a stranger.
” These cells act as a type of , face detector,  , a mechanism that helps learning about a certain category of stimulation, which is essential from the point of view of cultural life”.
New possibilities for ideas on learning.
The research suggests that teaching would not be possible without predisposed inherent systems. According to the authors of the study, learning from experience, through testing and problems, would take too long and with great risk of making mistakes.
Funding: The study has received Western money through Professor Vallortigara’s ERC Advanced grant , Spanumbra.
About this information on science and visual recognition
Author: Alessandra Saletti
Source: University of Trento
Contact: Alessandra Saletti – University of Trento
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Closed entry.
Giorgio Vallortigara and colleagues ‘” Innate face-selectivity in the brains of young local birds” Science
Abstract
Innate face-selectivity in fresh domestic birds ‘ minds
Both naive animals and newborn infants exhibit a unplanned attachment to faces and face-like stimulation shortly after birth.
Although the inferotemporal brain of child monkeys has been shown to have a selective response to eyes, face-selective regions in the brains of young primates appear to develop only later in life after exposure to eyes.
Since face tastes are well documented in nave animals, such as home birds raised without exposure to faces, there is a debate about the position of expertise in the creation of face-detector mechanisms.
Here, we demonstrate that neurons in a higher-order processing brain area of one-week-old face-naïve domestic chicks selectively respond to a face-like configuration.
These neurons do not respond to alternative configurations or distinct facial features, according to our single-cell recordings. Moreover, the population activity of face-selective neurons accurately encoded the face-like stimulus as a unique category.
Therefore, our findings demonstrate that face selectivity is present in the brains of young animals without any prior prior experience.
