How do you recognise that face? The human brain has a remarkable ability to recognise and remember faces, even in different situations and across large time gaps. How do we do it? Professor Bruno Rossion tells us about his work in investigating how the human brain builds a visual representation of a face, research which could lead to new insights into how the brain functions The field of cognitive
and systems neuroscience offers enormous scope for research, with scientists using a wide variety of techniques to build a deeper understanding of how the human brain functions. As the Principal Investigator of the FACESSVEP project, Professor Bruno Rossion is looking at one specific aspect of brain function. “We specifically focus on a brain function that we think is fundamental: Perceptual Categorisation – how the brain organises sensory information and labels the world, for instance to tell apart cats from
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dogs, and do so for all instances of these animal species. We are concentrating on vision, the dominant modality in humans” he outlines. “Within the field of vision, we use the human face as our favourite model. We want to understand how the brain recognises people by their face – that’s the main goal of the project, it’s the model for us to understand brain function.”
Facial identity This is a very rich model, as the visual system extracts a lot of sensory
information from an individual’s face to categorize it according to gender, emotion, age and a whole host of other things. The main focus for the project however is facial identity. “How do we use the face to identify people?” says Professor Rossion. The human brain has a great capacity to recognise and remember faces, even in different situations and across large time gaps, and there are no animal species that have developed such a level of expertise. “We’re able to clearly individualise faces, draw distinctions between faces, and are
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