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Never Forget A (Bird) Face?



Carolina Birders:

While snowed in at home this afternoon here in the central Piedmont of NC (a 
foot of snow!), I decided to catch up on e-mail. I came across this item on 
the BirdChat listserver that some of you fellow CarolinaBirders might find 
interesting.

Have you ever wondered what mechanism was behind a birder's ability to 
distinguish a Lesser Yellowlegs from a Greater Yellowlegs on one of those CBC 
trips to the coast? Today (Jan. 25), Reuters published an article titled, 
"Never forget a face? Become a bird watcher" that sheds some light on the 
subject. The piece reported on a study published in the journal Nature 
Neuroscience.

Apparently, it isn't only a matter of studying hard to learn what birds look 
like; identification skills may involve innate pattern recognition. 
Researchers at Vanderbilt University in Nashville believe that the same part 
of the brain that lets people remember human faces also is responsible for 
experienced people being able to instantly recognize and distinguish other 
things with which they're familiar. Among the test subjects in the study were 
"eight bird experts with many years of experience."

It appears that recognition information is processed in a region of the 
visual cortex called the "fusiform face area" (FFA). Using Functional 
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (a form of MRI) to look at the brain activity of 
the volunteers, the researchers discovered that the FFA "lit up when the 
experts looked at pictures of birds..." The researchers could tell just from 
looking at the images which of the volunteers were bird experts.

If you're interested in the complete text of this brief article, you can view 
it at: 
http://www.cnn.com/2000/NATURE/01/25/science.recognition.reut/index.html

Dennis Burnette
Greensboro, NC
burnetted@aol.com