User:Dmatkin/sandbox

The recognition of faces is an important neurological mechanism that an individual uses every day. Jeffrey and Rhodes said that faces "convey a wealth of information that we use to guide our social interactions." The ability of face recognition is apparent even in early childhood. By age five, the neurological mechanisms responsible for face recognition are present. Research shows that the way children process faces is similar to that of adults, however adults process faces more efficiently. The reason for this may be because of improvements in memory and cognitive functioning that occur with age.

There are several parts of the brain that play a role in face perception. Rossion, Hanseeuw, and Dricot used BOLD fMRI mapping to identify activation in the brain when subjects viewed both cars and faces. The majority of BOLD fMRI studies use blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) contrast to determine which areas of the brain are activated by various cognitive functions. They found that the occipital face area, located in the occipital lobe, the fusiform face area, a sulcus in the temporal lobe, the amygdala, and the anterior/inferior cortex of the temporal lobe, all played roles in contrasting the faces from the cars, with the initial face perception beginning in the fusiform face area and occipital face areas. This entire region links to form a network that acts to distinguish faces. The processing of faces in the brain is known as a "sum of parts" perception. However, the individual parts of the face must be processed first in order to put all of the pieces together. In early processing, the occipital face area contributes to face perception by recognizing the eyes, nose, and mouth as individual pieces. Furthermore, Arcurio, Gold, and James used BOLD fMRI mapping to determine the patterns of activation in the brain when parts of the face were presented in combination and when they were presented singly. The occipital face area is activated by the visual perception of single features of the face, for example, the nose and mouth, and preferred combination of two-eyes over other combinations. This research supports that the occipital face area recognizes the parts of the face at the early stages of recognition. On the contrary, the fusiform face area shows no preference for single features, because the fusiform face area is responsible for "holistic/configural" information, meaning that it puts all of the processed pieces of the face together in later processing. This theory is supported by the work of Gold et. al who found that regardless of the orientation of a face, subjects were impacted by the configuration of the individual facial features. Subjects were also impacted by the coding of the relationships between those features. This shows that processing is done by a summation of the parts in the later stages of recognition.

Just as memory and cognitive function separate the abilities of children and adults to recognize faces, the familiarity of a face may also play a role in the perception of faces. Zheng, Mondloch, and Segalowitz recorded event-related potentials in the brain to determine the timing of recognition of faces in the brain. The results of the study showed that familiar faces are indicated and recognized by a stronger N250, a specific wavelength response that plays a role in the visual memory of faces. Similarly, Moulson et al. found that all faces elicit the N170 response in the brain.