[Shotimes] (OT) And Your Point Is?? ;-)

[Ron Porter]

Car Buffs' Brains Recognize Cars as They Do Faces

By Merritt McKinney

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Many automobile buffs love their cars so much
that they give them names. Now, new research shows that car lovers use the
same part of the brain to identify cars that they use when recognizing
faces.


The findings, which appear in the journal Nature Neuroscience, add to
previous studies showing that other avid hobbyists, including bird watchers
and dog-show judges, identify the objects of their affection "holistically"
rather than by first recognizing individual features.


By studying how experts learn this ability, it may be possible to develop
ways to help people who have problems with recognizing faces, such as
children with autism, the study's lead author said.


In an interview with Reuters Health, Dr. Tim Curran explained that "when we
recognize faces, we do so by perceiving all the parts of the face
simultaneously." For example, Curran, who is at the University of Colorado
at Boulder, said that when people look at a photo of Bill Clinton, they
recognize him immediately without first looking at his nose, lips and other
features.


"You recognize his face holistically," Curran said.


When we look at other objects, though, we tend to recognize them in a "more
piecemeal fashion," Curran said.


A particular section of the brain is hard-wired to recognize faces at a
glance, and many experts have believed that this ability is something we are
born with, not something that we learn, Curran said. But previous
experiments with bird watchers and car aficionados showed that these experts
can recognize birds and cars holistically and that this ability can be
learned, the Colorado researcher said.


Now, Curran and his colleagues report that the ability to holistically
identify objects uses the same brain circuitry as the ability to recognize
faces.


The study included 20 men who were car experts and 20 men who were car
novices. Volunteers looked at a series of photos that alternated between
cars and faces. They were asked to compare each car with the one that they
had seen before.


The researchers modified the top halves of the photos and asked participants
to ignore the top parts in order to tell if they were viewing the faces and
cars holistically, rather than piece by piece.


As expected, car experts viewed cars holistically without any trouble. But
they ran into trouble when identifying faces holistically.


The researchers found that car experts showed differences in a particular
brain wave that is linked to face recognition. This observation--and the
fact that the volunteers had trouble recognizing faces
holistically--suggests that the experts use the same brain circuitry to
identify cars as they do to identify faces, according to the researchers.


In contrast, car novices had no problems recognizing faces holistically.


The research suggests that rather than being an innate skill, holistic
recognition could be "a product of experience," Curran said. Future
research, he said, will focus on understanding how the ability to view faces
holistically develops.


It is uncertain, Curran said, whether it is just the frequency of exposure
to images that leads to these changes or whether it is a more active
learning process.


Building on the findings, some researchers are in the very early stages of
developing video games that give children with autism, who often have a very
hard time identifying faces, a lot of practice in doing so.


SOURCE: Nature Neuroscience 2003;10.1038/nn1029.