Placing Faces

“Haven’t you got nice eyes?” someone might say. Or ‘Hollywood teeth’, ‘a funny mouth’, maybe a ‘George Clooney chin’. But is it really these features you recognise first? Students were asked to spot identical faces in a fast sequence of pictures (non-identical faces can be seen on the left). But there was a twist – some of the faces, like the ones on the right, had jumbled-up features. The students’ brain activity was measured during the test. An area at the base of their brains, the fusiform face area, ‘lit up’ consistently when presented with identical normal faces. Jumbled-up faces produced different patterns of brain activity and resemblance was far more difficult to spot. No matter what the magazines tell you, our brains appear to interpret faces as whole entities rather than as collections of individual features.

Written by John Ankers

John Ankers

Writer

A former researcher in systems biology, John is now an online biology tutor and professional coach supporting the wellbeing of scientists and NHS professionals. He's writing, too, of course.

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• Jia Liu
• Beijing Normal University, China
• Originally published under Creative Commons (CC-BY 2.0)
• Published in PLoS ONE 7(7)