Self Face Recognition And The Brain

Self-Face Recognition and the Brain explores a fundamental cornerstone of human consciousness; how recognizing ourselves leads to a better understanding of the brain and higher-order thinking. Featuring contributions from an interdisciplinary range of researchers, each chapter provides a unique insight into one aspect of self-face recognition. The book begins by introducing readers to the concept of self-face recognition, covering issues like the mirror-test and whether animals can recognize themselves, before addressing the role of neural correlates and attempts at localizing consciousness. It then discusses various disorders and the impact they can have on self-face recognition before considering how neuroscience can heighten our understanding of the field. It will be an essential read for all researchers of self-face recognition, from psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience backgrounds.

Face perception is the process by which the brain and mind understand and interpret the face, particularly the human face. The face is an important site for the identification of others and conveys significant social information. Probably because of the importance of its role in social interaction, psychological processes involved in face perception are known to be present from birth, to be complex, and to involve large and widely distributed areas in the brain. These parts of the brain can be damaged to cause a specific impairment in understanding faces known as prosopagnosia. This book presents the latest research in the field.

Whether we like to admit it or not, most of us care about our own appearance: we spend some of each day in front of mirrors, invest our hard-earned money on grooming ourselves for both business and pleasure, and are increasingly prone to taking ‘selfies’. The basis of such behaviours is self-recognition, the process of identifying our own physical appearance. Over the last 200 years, this seemingly mundane ability has become increasingly subject to investigation by social scientists who are attempting to tease out some of its associated complexities: How do we recognize ourselves? Does it involve self-awareness? When does it develop? Which species do and do not show self-recognition? How does the brain perform self-recognition? What is the evolutionary value—if any—of self-recognition? Very few clear-cut answers exist for these questions; perhaps most problematic is the absence of consensus about how the brain underlies self-recognition. This book provides a broad multidisciplinary theoretical framework and an extensive overview concerning these issues, which—in conjunction with the advocation and execution of novel experimental paradigms—ultimately offers researchers an example of how to further clarify our understanding not only for the neural basis of self-recognition, but also its development, mechanisms, and function.

Although most people are good at face recognition, we are particularly good at recognizing the faces of individuals who share our race, gender, age and species. What factors might account for this type of bias in face recognition? This collection considers the issue of how our identity influences the type of perceptual experience that we have to faces, which, in turn, influences the processes of face recognition. Leading experts from cognitive psychology, neuroscience and computer science address a wide range of topics related to the neural and computational basis of the "own versus other" effect in face recognition, the impact of early experience in infant face recognition, the effect of laboratory training to reverse the other-race effect, cultural differences in expression recognition and the forensic and social consequences of "own versus other" face recognition. The combined work gives the reader a comprehensive overview of the field and an insider’s perspective on the role that identity and experience play in the everyday process of face recognition. This book was originally published as a special issue of Visual Cognition.

This book provides readers with a simplified and comprehensive account of the cognitive and neural bases of face perception in humans. Faces are ubiquitous in our environment and we rely on them during social interactions. The human face processing system allows us to extract information about the identity, gender, age, mood, race, attractiveness and approachability of other people in about a fraction of a second, just by glancing at their faces. By introducing readers to the most relevant research on face recognition, this book seeks to answer the questions: “Why are humans so fast at recognizing faces?”, “Why are humans so efficient at recognizing faces?”, “Do faces represent a particular category for the human visual system?”, What makes face perception in humans so special?, “Can our face recognition system fail”?. This book presents the author’s findings on face perception during his research studies on both normal subjects and subjects with prosopagnosia, a neurological disorder characterized by the inability to recognize faces. The book describes two known forms of prosopagnosia: acquired prosopagnosia, which is the result of a brain lesion, and congenital prosopagnosia, which refers to a lifelong, developmental impairment of face recognition. Written in a comprehensive and accessible style, this book addresses both experts (cognitive scientists, psychologists, neuroscientists and computer scientists) and the general public, and aims at raising awareness for a debilitating face recognition disorder, such as prosopagnosia, which is often ignored or misdiagnosed as autism, with serious consequences for the affected persons and their families.

Annotation In 1997, Rakover (U. of Haifa) and Cahlon (Oakland U, Michigan) won an award from the Minister of Internal Security of the State of Israel for developing the Catch model for face recognition. Since then they have proposed the law of Face Recognition by Similarity. Here they describe the computer and mathematical research they have conducted and some of their results. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

The high degree of scientific interest in face processing is readily understandable, since people's faces provide such a wealth of social information. Moreover, investigations have produced evidence of highly precocious face processing abilities in infants, and of neural mechanisms in adults that seem to be differentially involved in face perception. Such findings demonstrate that, as one might expect, the psychological importance of the face has clear biological underpinnings.There are also urgent practical reasons for wanting to understand face processing. The most extensively investigated of these involve forensic issues. Other applications include the development of automated recognition systems for security and other purposes, and understanding and rehabilitating disorders and impairments linked to brain injuries and psychiatric conditions.Current studies of face processing are grouped in the volume into eleven topic areas. For each area, the editors approached an acknowledged authority and commissioned a review chapter summarising the findings that have been made. These chapters were then circulated to other experts who were asked to write brief commentaries that developed theoretical or empirical points of importance to each area. In this way, a balanced coverage of each topic is achieved.The book begins with a section examining the evidence suggesting that there may be something `special' about face processing. This is followed by consideration of the face as a visual pattern. Then there are four sections dealing with major uses of facial information, followed by sections discussing the development of face processing abilities and the neural mechanisms involved. The last three sections of the book deal with topics for which there are important practical applications for the studies reported.

We've all witnessed this moment: a dog, a cat, or another animal reacting to its own reflection in the mirror, treating it as another animal to be played with or confronted. As human beings, we take self-recognition for granted, but this seemingly simple ability represents one of the most complex mysteries of neuroscience. The Face in the Mirror takes readers on a lively tour of the neurological, anthropological, and psychological roots of self-recognition -- from the intricate network in the brain that enables higher primates to recognize their image to complex, self-related emotions such as humor, embarrassment, and jealousy that play a crucial role in our evolution and survival. From animals who share our ability for self-recognition to case studies of patients who no longer recognize who they are, the authors examine some of the latest evidence on a subject that has puzzled philosophers and scientists for millennia -- how do we know who we are?