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<DIV class=OutlookMessageHeader dir=ltr align=left><FONT face=Tahoma
size=2></FONT></DIV><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff size=2></FONT>From <A
href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/04/040402071910.htm">Science
Daily</A>: MIT scientists are reporting new insights into how the human brain
recognizes objects, especially faces, in work that could lead to improved
machine vision systems, diagnostics for certain neurological conditions and
more. What is novel about this work is that it provides direct evidence of
contextual cues eliciting object-specific neural responses in the brain. <BR>The
team used functional magnetic resonance imaging to map neuronal responses of the
brain's fusiform face area (FFA) to a variety of images. These included clear
faces, blurred faces attached to bodies, blurred faces alone, bodies alone, and
a blurred face placed in the wrong context (below the torso, for example). Only
the clear faces and blurred faces with proper contextual cues elicited strong
FFA responses. "These data support the idea that facial representations
underlying FFA activity are based not only on intrinsic facial cues, but rather
incorporate contextual information as well. <BR>Computer recognition systems
work reasonably well when images are clear, but they break down catastrophically
when images are degraded. A human's ability is so far beyond what the computer
can do. The new work could aid the development of better systems by changing our
concept of the kind of image information useful for determining what an object
is. <BR>From the original <A
href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/nr/2004/vision.html">MIT news release</A>:
The findings not only add to scientists' understanding of the brain and vision,
but also open up some very interesting issues from the perspective of
developmental neuroscience. For example, how does the brain acquire the ability
to use contextual cues? Are we born with this ability, or is it learned over
time? Pawan Sinha, an assistant professor in the Department of Brain and
Cognitive Sciences (BCS), is exploring these questions through <A
href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/nr/2003/sinha.html">Project Prakash</A>, a
scientific and humanitarian effort to look at how individuals who are born blind
but later gain some vision perceive objects and faces.</DIV></BODY></HTML>