Thursday, December 9, 2010

Fusiform Face Area

Faces are among the most important visual stimuli we perceive, informing us not only about a person’s identity, but also about their mood, sex, age and direction of gaze. The ability to extract this information within a fraction of a second of viewing a face is important for normal social interactions.  We have recently learned about fusiform face area which is a region of the brain that plays a major role in face perception.  Fusiform face area engages both in detected faces and determining the perceptual information to recognize them.  Ever since I was young I was very good with recognizing people and names no matter how long ago it may have been since I have last seen them and also am very good at reading people’s emotions although they may believe they are hiding them.   I found it interesting in the fact that such a small part of our brain plays the role in identifying not only faces but places and things as well. 

No comments:

Post a Comment