Author Topic: Monkeys And Humans Perceive Faces Similarly  (Read 501 times)

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Monkeys And Humans Perceive Faces Similarly
« on: February 22, 2015, 07:44:14 PM »



We store an awful lot of information about people—consciously and unconsciously—especially when those faces belong to conspecifics (ranging from immediate family members to fellow churchgoers and so forth).

A 2010 experiment at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tubingen, Germany provided evidence that both humans and monkeys use similar physical mechanisms for the task of processing facial information. They used a well-known illusion called the “Thatcher illusion” to aid them.

The Thatcher illusion demonstrates that the brain has a hard time processing the image of a face if it is upside down. You will think that the photo looks alright when, in reality, it has been distorted before being turned around and shown to you.

The scientists in Germany, who published their results in Proceedings B of the Royal Society, had humans and macaque monkeys look at two photos of a face next to each other—one normal, one distorted. Two more of the same photos were placed under those, but these ones were upside down. They were then shown the same layout using the faces of the opposite species.

For the humans looking at themselves, it was obvious which photo was distorted when right-side-up, but the upside-down photos produced the Thatcher illusion as normal. But, when they looked at the photo of the macaques, the Thatcher illusion was present with all sets of photos. The distortions were nearly invisible.

The monkeys were trained and prepared for the task through a period of environmental habituation and then implanted with a headpiece that would track their eye movements. What researchers found was that the monkeys performed exactly the same, easily recognizing the distortions in their own species (but only when right-side-up), but not those in the humans.

Both people and monkeys process faces holistically, and the fact that both species possess a counterpart to the Thatcher illusion, if verified, demonstrates the similar ways both brains evolved to recognize facial features. -- http://listverse.com/

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