MIT Neuroscientists Discover That Computers Identify Faces in a Surprisingly Human-Like Fashion

When artificial intelligence is tasked with visually identifying objects and faces, it assigns specific components of its network to face recognition -- just like the human brain. 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 on March 16, 2022, 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.