Vision Scientist Wins Golden Brain Award for Research Showing How the Brain Interprets Faces

Berkeley, CA....A vision scientist whose research describes how the brain interprets faces has won the Golden Brain Award from the Berkeley-based Minerva Foundation.  The Golden Brain Award honors researchers who make fundamental contributions to our knowledge of vision and the brain. David Perrett, professor of psychology at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, has been selected for demonstrating how cells in the temporal cortex--the primary place for visual memory in the brain—process information about the face.

"Over the past 15 years, David Perrett has brought us closer to understanding the circuitry of how the brain works," said Elwin Marg, executive director of the Minerva Foundation.
        

Perrett discussed his research in a seminar on "Interpreting Faces" at the University of California, Berkeley on April 18 in Minor Hall.  In addition to his physiological findings, Perrett touched upon his work exploring how people use facial cues to make social judgments. 

Integrating Cues from Specialized Cells

Working with monkeys whose vision and brain systems function like those of humans, Perrett has shown that the brain integrates cues from highly specialized cells that respond to visual stimuli such as form, motion, color, and facial features. Using a process that builds a successively more complicated picture of facial structure and orientation, the brain ultimately extracts information that is important for social interaction, such as the direction of the gaze of the person being observed.

"We've found that cells in the temporal cortex are highly specialized for detecting faces and ignoring all other stimuli," Perrett said.  "My work has been to detect what information these cells provide--the identity of the face, where it is looking, what emotions it reveals. Faces are so important to us that we dedicate a lot of our brain
to their processing. These processes have a deep survival value."

Out of Sight, Not Out of Mind

Perrett has also shown that memory and imagination play a part in processing visual cues in the temporal cortex.  With researcher Christopher Baker, Perrett recently demonstrated that cells sometimes continue to respond to the presence of people, even when the people are hidden from sight, as if "remembering" them until they re-emerge.