An optimized solution for face recognition

The human brain seems to care a lot about faces. It's dedicated a specific area to identifying them, and the neurons there are so good at their job that most of us can readily recognize thousands of individuals. With artificial intelligence, computers can now recognize faces with a similar efficiency -- and neuroscientists at MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research have found that a computational network trained to identify faces and other objects discovers a surprisingly brain-like strategy to sort them all out. The finding, reported March 16 in Science Advances, suggests that the millions of years of evolution that have shaped circuits in the human brain have optimized our system for facial recognition. "The human brain's solution is to segregate the processing of faces from the processing of objects," explains Katharina Dobs, who led the study as a postdoc in the lab of McGovern investigator Nancy Kanwisher, the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT.