The Seventh Annual Conference on Neuroesthetics

Many Faces of a Face

This morning I drove to the art museum at U.C Berkeley to attend this day-long, multidisciplinary (and free) conference. My pal Zack Lynch was in the lobby waiting for the doors to open. The last time we’d seen one another was last year. Or maybe it was the year before. Brain in a blender. It all runs together.

Ken Nakayama, Normal and abnormal face processing in human observer. About 2% of the population has prosopagnosia; they can’t distinguish faces. They develop compensating strategies. See http://facebllind.org

Kalanit Grill-Spector, Neural basic of face perception in humans. Do we recognize faces or parts of faces? It’s a bit of both. Lots of grant money has been spent on a dozen researchers and lots of fMRI testing to show what part of the brain does what and show it with colored dots on Powerpoint slides.

Minna Ng, The gender, ethnicity of individual identity of faces. Morphs of faces from Asian to Caucasian are effected by adaptation from what you’ve seen before. Morphs of faces from male to female are not effected by adaptation. Morphs of simultaneous change of gender and ethnicity are effected.

Kevin Pelphrey, Perceiving the actions, goods, and intentions of others: brain mechanisms for social perception. Is lab looks at how brains social perception; neural basis of social perception dysfunction in autism; biological basis of development of social perception.

Gaze is a social cue, mutual gaze often signaling threat or approach and averted gaze, submission. 7-10 seconds is time of maximum difference between direct and averted gaze. Autistics have gaze behavior impairment. Normal people looks others in the eye, sometime mouth. Autistics look off in the distance.

How do we understand the contents of another person’s social perceptions? Same as we use to categorize objects. (Duh.) The level of neuroticism is proportional to eye gaze irregularities.

Unlike my previous three conferences on neuroesthetics, the scientists today aren’t getting through to me. Models of human brains and probability distributions don’t map to my reality. These first three have no stage presence. Furthermore, they are 100% neuro. The aesthetics part of the equation has dropped off the radar.

Bruno Rossion, Face blindness: the perceptual and neural bases of acquired prosopagnosia. Acquired from brain damage. Prosopagnosia = without knowledge of the face. Specific parts of the face signal specific emotions. London woman hit by a bus; left with giant brain lesions. She can’t recognize people, but can tell a face from an object.

Andy Calder, In the eye of the beholder: how personality affected the neural basis of facial expression processing.

The Law of Two Feet. I am getting less and less from this event, so I’m going to bail. The remaining presentations are on facial color and sexuality, and on the complexity of software to automatically create emotional faces in virtual worlds. Zzzzzzz…