<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Zip Monster</i>
<br />you might want to note that unlike the Cydonia Face, the proponents of these false “faces” like the “Virgin Mary” - admit seeing a face and accept these images as (although projections) obvious facial formations and never question any manipulation of the image by the “discoverer.” <hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">That may well be true, but that was a good article so let's see what the scientists are actually saying about the subject, because it is very much to the point I was making for months in the Pareidolia Topic. Here are a few highlighted points {<b>emphasis added</b>}:
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">February 13, 2007
Faces, Faces Everywhere
By ELIZABETH SVOBODA
{excerpts}
Why do we see faces everywhere we look? .........
Compelling answers are beginning to emerge from biologists and computer scientists who are gaining new insights into how the brain recognizes and processes facial data.
<b>Long before she had heard of Diana Duyser’s grilled-cheese sandwich</b>, Doris Tsao, a neuroscientist at the University of Bremen in Germany, had an inkling that people might process faces differently from other objects. Her suspicion was that a particular area of the brain gives faces priority, like an airline offering first-class passengers expedited boarding.
......... “So we started questioning whether there really might be an area in the brain that is dedicated to face recognition.”
.........She discovered almost immediately that groups of cells in three regions of the brain’s temporal lobe seemed to be strongly attuned to faces.
“The first day we put the electrode in, it was shocking,” Dr. Tsao said. “Cell after cell responded to faces but not at all to other objects.” Her results were published in October in the journal Science.
Dr. Tsao’s investigation yielded a surprising related finding: <b>areas of the brain she had identified as face-specific occasionally lighted up in response to objects that bore only a passing resemblance to faces. </b>
“Nonface objects may have certain features that are weakly triggering these face cells,” she said. “If you go above a certain threshold, the monkeys might think that they’re seeing a face.” In the same way, she said, objects like cinnamon buns, <b>rocky outcroppings</b> and cloud formations <b>may set off face radar if they bear enough resemblance to actual faces</b>.
Pawan Sinha, a cognitive scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has devoted years of research to figuring out just what attributes touch off these face-specific pings........
To develop detector software optimized to pick out any human face, ......, Dr. Sinha began by putting into his computer hundreds of faces as varied as those in a Benetton advertisement famous for its diversity.
As the computer amassed the information, it was able to discover <b>relationships that were of great significance to almost all faces, but very few nonfaces...“These turn out to be very simple relationships, things like the eyes are always darker than the forehead, and the mouth is darker than the cheeks,”. Dr. Sinha said. “If you put together about 12 of these relationships, you get a template that you can use to locate a face.” </b>
.......This suggests that like the computer, the human brain processes faces holistically, like coherent landscapes, rather than one feature at a time.
These images are just “ dark blobs on a big blob,” Dr. Sinha said. “So clearly there’s not enough diagnostic information in the individual features. <b>Yet something about the overall organization of the image, the gestalt, is still allowing us to recognize the face.”</b>
Once in a while, the computer emits a false alarm. ......
“But this prototype is not perfect,” he said. “Sometimes genuine faces do not match these regularities, <b>and sometimes nonfaces satisfy them.</b>”
While the human tendency to see faces in other objects is rooted in neural architecture, the large number of actual faces we see every day may also be partly responsible for the Nun Bun phenomenon, said Takeo Watanabe, a neuroscientist at Boston University. <b>His studies of learning processes show that after the brain is bombarded with a stimulus, it continues to perceive that stimulus even when it is not present.</b>
To demonstrate this effect....{see article}
Dr. Watanabe says the results suggest that subliminally learning something “too well” interferes with perceptions of reality. “As a result of repeated presentation, the subjects developed enhanced sensitivity to the dots,” he said. <b>“Their sensitivity got so high that they saw them even when there was nothing there.” </b>
<b>Because faces make up such a significant part of the visual backdrop of life</b>, he added, they may fall into the same category as the dots: <b>people have gotten so used to seeing faces everywhere that sensitivity to them is high enough to produce constant false positives.</b> ....... “If you lived in primeval times, for instance,” Dr. Watanabe said, “it would be good to be very sensitized to tigers.”
Dr. Sinha of M.I.T. says that whether the hair-trigger response to faces is innate or learned, <b>it represents a critical evolutionary adaptation, one that dwarfs side effects like seeing Beelzebub in a crumpled tissue.</b>
“The information faces convey is so rich — not just regarding another person’s identity, but also their mental state, health and other factors,” he said. “It’s extremely beneficial for the brain to become good at the task of face recognition and not to be very strict in its inclusion criteria. <b>The cost of missing a face is higher than the cost of declaring a nonface to be a face.”</b>
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
rd
Topic Author
