PSYC 336 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Facial Recognition System, Prosopagnosia, Inferior Temporal Gyrus

• School: University of San Diego
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 336
• Professor: Appleton-Knapp

Document Summary

Tissue in the inferotemporal cortex near what pathway. Fire when a certain type of object is on the scene. Neurons = view-tuned fire most strongly to a particular view of the target object. Some brain tissue is sensitive to viewpoint, some aren"t. Categorization tasks rely on viewpoint-independent processing in the brain. Agnosia inability to recognize certain stimuli. Prosopagnosia inability to recognize individual faces. Can also be present at birth w/o brain damage. Implies the existence of special neural structures involved almost exclusively in the recognition and discrimination of faces. Results from problem or limitation in the functioning of this brain tissue. Face recognition pattern that"s the opposite of prosopagnosia. Really really good at remembering faces after a short exposure. No special advantage in other perceptual or memory tasks. More successful in tasks that require face matching judging whether two different views of a face actually show the same person. People differ widely in their ability to remember and recognize faces.