Why do we recognise faces

This means that, as far as your neurons are concerned, a face is a sum of separate parts, as opposed to a single structure. Chang notes he was able to create faces that appeared extremely different but produced the same patterns of neural firing because they shared key features.

This method of face recognition stands in contrast to what some neuroscientists previously thought about how humans recognize faces. Understanding this pattern of neural firing allowed Chang to create an algorithm by which he could actually reverse engineer the patterns of just neurons firing as the monkey looked at a face to create what faces the monkey was seeing without even knowing what face the monkey was seeing.

Like a police sketch artist working with a person to combine facial features, he was able to take the features suggested by the activity of each individual neuron and combine them into a complete face. In nearly 70 percent of cases, humans drawn from the crowdsourcing website Amazon Turk matched the original face and the recreated face as being the same.

In the bottom left, the photo on the top left has been flipped over. What happens if you flip over the photo on the top right? To do this, move your mouse over the photo on the bottom right.

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It's also important in detecting predators. In addition to confirming how our brains process faces, the study could raise new questions about our understanding of cognitive disorders relating to facial recognition.

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