CHAPTER 4.13: Face Processing

Question 1

the dorsal stream moves in what direction?

Answer 1

through the back and top of the brain

Question 2

the ventral stream moves in what direction?

Answer 2

underside into temporal lobe of brain

Question 3

what is the purpose of the ventral (what) stream?

Answer 3

object and face recognition

Question 4

what is the fusiform face area?

Answer 4

area of brain solely dedicated to recognizing faces!

Question 5

what is paredoilia?

Answer 5

finding faces in objects where there actually is no face (ex. in the shape of clouds)

Question 6

what is prosopagnosia?

Answer 6

when damage occurs to fusiform face area, and people cant perceive/recognize faces as a whole:(

recognize people feature by feature (ex. unique nose)

Question 7

what is holistic face processing?

Answer 7

processing a face in its entirety, not just as its features

Question 8

what is the greeble experiment? how was it conducted?

Answer 8

experiment that showed that fusiform face area is ACTUALLY responsible for visual expertise, not specific to faces

greebles were shown (literally random objects) to people and you cant really tell how they are related. but with enough training, people were able to tell. the activity of the FFA was measured both before and after this training when looking at greebles, and it was shown that activity increased after training, thus proving that FFA is dedicated to visual expertise (being able to tell similar things apart) as a whole, not just to faces.