Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

The Mind's Eye 273before the tests. Since the accident he has been utterly unable to recognizefaces. He cannot recognize his wife and children (except by voice,scent, or gait), his own face in a mirror, or celebrities in photographs(unless they have a visual trademark like Einstein, Hitler, and the Beatlesin their moptop days). It was not that he had trouble making out thedetails of a face; he could match full faces with their profiles, even inarty sidelighting, and assess their age, sex, and beauty. And he was virtuallynormal at recognizing complicated objects that were not faces,including words, clothing, hairstyles, vehicles, tools, vegetables, musicalinstruments, office chairs, eyeglasses, dot patterns, and televisionantenna-like shapes. There were only two kinds of shapes he had troublewith. He was embarrassed that he could not name his children's animalcrackers; similarly, in the lab he was below average at naming drawings ofanimals. And he had some trouble recognizing facial expressions such asfrowns, sneers, and fearful looks. But neither animals nor facial expressionswere as hard for him as faces, which drew utter blanks.It's not that faces are the hardest things our brains are ever calledupon to recognize, so that if a brain is not running on all eight cylinders,face recognition will be the first thing to suffer. The psychologists MarleneBehrmann, Morris Moscbvitch, and Gordon Winocur studied ayoung man who had been hit on the head by the rear-view mirror of apassing truck. He has trouble recognizing everyday objects but no troublerecognizing faces, even when the faces are disguised with glasses,wigs, or mustaches. His syndrome is the opposite of prosopagnosia, andit proves that face recognition is different from object recognition, notjust harder.So do prosopagnosics have a broken face-recognition module? Somepsychologists, noting that LH and other prosopagnosics have some troublewith some other shapes, would rather say that prosopagnosics havetrouble processing the kinds of geometric features that are most useful inrecognizing faces, though also useful in recognizing certain other kindsof shapes. I think the distinction between recognizing faces and recognizingobjects with the geometry of faces is meaningless. From thebrain's point of view, nothing is a face until it has been recognized as aface. The only thing that can be special about a perception module is thekind of geometry it pays attention to, such as the distance between symmetricalblobs, or the curvature pattern of 2-D elastic surfaces that aredrawn over a 3-D skeleton and filled out by underlying soft pads andconnectors. If objects other than faces (animals, facial expressions, or