ABOUT FACE

About Face



About Face

Prosopagnosia

Prosopagnosia is a neuropsychological syndrome that is characterized by cognitive impairments in visual processing of faces. Lesions causing the syndrome always include the occipitotemporal region of the right hemisphere. Although some evidence suggests that bilateral damage in posterior cortex is necessary for the deficit to occur, the current consensus is that the right hemisphere damage suffices. Most commonly, prosopagnosic patients are able to discriminate a face from a "non-face" stimulus but have trouble identifying individuals.

Patients with prosopagnosia show impairments on explicit recognition tasks that involve the identification of prominent individuals. They also perform poorly on delayed matching tasks in which they are first presented with unfamiliar faces and subsequently asked to select these from a larger array. Substantial evidence, however, has accumulated over the last decade which indicates that prosopagnosic patients possess implicit knowledge about the familiarity of faces, about face identity and semantic information (accessed through faces). This evidence has been obtained with psycho-physiological as well as behavioral measures.

What area of the brain is believed to play a vital role in face perception?

There are a number of other regions outside the occipitotemporal cortex that belong to an extended face recognition system and play a critical role in other aspects of face perception such as emotional and semantic processing. For example, the "amygdalae" serve as part of the extended network and are involved in extracting information regarding facial expressions, particularly that o1 fear. Thus the FFA may play a leading role in face perception. There is growing consensus that different aspects of face processing require the coordinated activity of many brain regions.

Explain two motivation systems as described in the article.

If we want to know what matters proximately to human beings, we should try to get a fix on human motivational systems. These systems are numerous and varied, full of details that would take us far afield. A human is as complex as they are precisely because they have so many motivational systems operating simultaneously. For our purposes, it will be enough to gather these systems into three broad categories: curiosity motivators, hedonic motivators, and social motivators. What matters to humans is to maximize the goods inherent in satisfying these motivational systems (Barclay, 2005).

Infants show conflicting preferences when looking at faces versus other objects. This finding has led researchers to believe that there are multiple motivation systems that govern an infant's behavior. The two most important systems, which have been described in this article, are social and non- social system. Social systems ate the system which has the direct attachment relationships with the same entity. Whereas, "non-social" system is the system that have the ability in infants to discovers the assets of novel entity in their atmosphere.

Researchers debate about whether face perception is an innate skill (we are born with it) or a learned skill (we acquire it with age).

Basic face perception skills develop surprisingly rapidly during an infant's development. As early as a few days after birth, infants appear to be able to distinguish their mother's ...