Scientists Decipher the Neural Code For Faces

New submitter akakaak writes: In a new paper published in Cell, researchers Le Chang and Doris Tsao claim to have uncovered "The Code for Facial Identity in the Primate Brain." They develop a model representing each face as a vector in a 50-dimensional "face-space," and show that the firing rate for each face-sensitive neuron represents the location along a single axis through this space. This allows them to accurately predict the appearance of a viewed face from the collective recorded activity of the neurons. This work is a major advance in the decoding of complex neural representations, and refutes exemplar-based models of face recognition. Further reading: Scientific American

"pictures of Halle Berry

[turkeydance]

members of The Beatles or characters from The Simpsons activated separate neurons". i bet they did.

Re:

[__aanljs7351]

Here's a photo of my football player body. That do anything for ya?
http://g01.a.alicdn.com/kf/HTB... [alicdn.com]

Tyvek suits?

[Frosty Piss]

I'll bet this was some very smelly research!

This is ground breaking.

[PerlPunk]

Basically, the result from the paper show that from the data recorded from the primates' neurons, it is possible to recreate with high accuracy the image the monkeys saw.

The potential technology developed from this finding would astounding. For example, a scanner could be developed that could allow police to ask a victim to remember what the criminal looked like and produce a near photographic image of him.

Re: This is ground breaking.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or of anyone else the "victim" wants to incriminate

Re:

[bbelt16ag]

or they could use it as another tool to steal our passwords or invade our memories.

Re:

[religionofpeas]

For example, a scanner could be developed that could allow police to ask a victim to remember what the criminal looked like and produce a near photographic image of him.

That's assuming that the neural patterns are still present in the brain, which is a big assumption

G.D.

[Cmdln Daco]

Steal Your Face [youtube.com]

Re: nobel prize material

[PoopJuggler]

And it's still the fucking Kardashians who make all the headlines.

Re:

[Captain Splendid]

If you think the Kardashians make all the headlines, that says more about you and the websites you visit than society in general.

Face blindness

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder what the output looks like for those of us with face blindness? Do I have an accurate representation in my head and just fail to load it, or am I not saving them properly?

Test object

[nospam007]

They should test it on the orange sphincter, he can't control his face at all, that's why he looks so stupid on all the photos.

Still not clear

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

OK they found like 100 neurons which encode faces. That doesn't make it clear at all how and where individual neuron states are stored in your (long term) memory. These neurons themselves obviously cannot do that.

Facefarm would love this

[TheOuterLinux]

"What you type is nonsense. What you read is nonsense. Yet, the most purest and honest data we can mine is biometrics." Not an actual quote, but it sounds like something Mark Z thinks in the back of his mind, all 200 neurons.

perceptual representation

[epine]

This appears to be a highly evolved perceptual representation of a core social competence. Even if it doesn't generalize, it's the biggest science result since the second LIGO detection.

It's already enough to further manipulate the masses, once exploited by the ad men, the plastic surgeons, and the mayfly scions of social media.

As a reliable bijection, research can already begin correlating the genomic racial space with 50-dimensional face space, no electrodes required. I'm betting Africa and Australia ge

Good for them

[Sqreater]

This looks exactly like my n-dimensional "behavior-space" and the motivation vector that must be zeroed by a behavior or behaviors. This is the way to go.