Facial Recognition: Brains 'Map' How Others' Faces Look

Some of us are better at recognizing and recalling faces than others. As it turns out, a new study has found that human brains have a "map" for picking up the details of others' faces. So, some people's maps might work more effectively.

Essentially, as you move or feel, the areas of your body used for that have representation in your brain's outer layer. The new findings indicate that this also applies to looking at others' faces, according to a study led by Aalto University in Finland.

In the study, scientists did brain scans of 12 people while the individuals gazed at images of eyes, noses, mouths and other facial features. The team took note of which brain areas activated as people looked at the faces.

As a result, they found a part of the occipital face area, a region of the brain that is already known to perform facial processing, where features alongside one another on an actual face are put together in a representation of that face, as the brain organizes it. This is the map, and the team is calling it the "faciotopy."

"Facial recognition is so fundamental to human behaviour that it makes sense that there would be a specialised area of the brain that maps features of the face," Linda Henriksson of Aalto University said in an  article in New Scientist.

Perhaps differences in individuals' faciotopy explain why some people don't recall faces, including those who have prosopagnosia, or face blindness, Brad Duchaine at Dartmouth College, who was not involved in the study, said in the article.

The study findings were recently published in the journal Science Direct. 

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