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Never Forget A (Bird) Face?
- To: carolinabirds@duke.edu
- Subject: Never Forget A (Bird) Face?
- From: Burnetted@aol.com
- Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 14:20:01 EST
- Sender: carolinabirds-owner@acpub.duke.edu
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