Fusiform What? Area

Today I've been thinking about the fusiform face area (FFA). This is a part of the brain that is specifically involved in the recognition of human faces. People with damage to the FFA develop prosopagnosia, a selective inability to discriminate between or recognize faces that occurs even though vision is unimpaired and they are able to identify other objects. (If you are familiar with Oliver Sacks' famous book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, the man in question had prosopagnosia.) The existence of this specialized brain region suggests that faces may be a special kind of object.

Of course, it easily makes sense to us that human faces are special, but this interpretation is a little bit complicated because human faces are also a type of object with which we are very, very familiar and for which we have arguably developed high levels of expertise. So is it really a fusiform face area, or is it an area that comes into play when viewing objects for which a person has great expertise?

I enjoyed reading an article about a study that found that people with significant expertise identifying birds (averaging 18 years) showed activation in the FFA when viewing pictures of birds (New England passerines). (Car experts did the same when viewing pictures of cars but not birds.) The researchers were able to predict performance on a behavioral identification task from the level of activation of the right hemisphere FFA in the neuroimaging study. They also discussed a bird watcher who, after damage to the FFA, was no longer able to recognize birds.

Other research suggests that the use of the FFA in face recognition specifically is at least partly innate, since people with brain damage from birth have shown an inability to recognize faces. Perhaps the FFA really is a face area that gets involved in object recognition for other things with high enough levels of expertise.

So I suppose you know you are a serious birder when you have recruited the FFA, which people use to recognize their spouse, children, Jennifer Aniston, etc., to identify a common yellowthroat.

The article also cites reseach showing that novices use a "featural" strategy for identifying things like birds while experts use a "configural" strategy, which is another way of saying that birders identify familiar birds on the basis of their general impression of size and shape.

This brings up another thing that I've been complaining about for years now - the tendency for experts to want to teach novices how they themselves do a particular task, which is extremely common in, say, the teaching of mathematics. (In a birding context, this method would be like my mom asking me how I know a bird is a grasshopper sparrow and me saying "well, it just looks like an ammodramus sparrow.") I've been reading a bit about the late Robbie Case and his efforts to develop math teaching methods that involve identifying the natural developmental pathway for understanding some bit of knowledge and teaching that rather than the expert's solution (e.g. "set up two ratios and solve for x"). Interesting stuff.

Source: Gauthier, I., Kludlarski, P., Gore, J. C., & Anderson, A. W. (2000). Expertise for cars and birds recruits brain areas involved in face recognition. Nature Neuroscience, 3, 191-197.
doi:10.1038/72140