The Dissenter

#1146 Brad Duchaine: Face Perception, Prosopagnosia, and Prosopometamorphopsia

22 snips
Sep 5, 2025
Guest
Brad Duchaine
In this discussion with Brad Duchaine, a Professor at Dartmouth College, listeners dive deep into the fascinating world of face perception. Duchaine unpacks prosopagnosia, a condition that hinders face recognition, and its significant psychosocial impacts, including loneliness. He also explores prosopometamorphopsia, a rare distortion of facial perception, detailing how contextual influences can alter our visual experiences. With insights into the brain's mechanisms and potential improvements in recognition abilities, this conversation sheds light on the complexities of social perception.
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INSIGHT

Face Processing Is A Fast, Distributed Network

  • Face processing relies on a distributed network of occipital, temporal and frontal areas that produce rapid social judgments.
  • These areas form connected modules that produce identity, expression, gaze, and trait inferences within a split second.
INSIGHT

Dedicated Face-Selective Neurons Exist

  • Face-selective regions exist and contain neurons that respond almost exclusively to faces.
  • When isolated, those areas show strong responses to faces compared with other object categories.
INSIGHT

Familiarity Builds Robust Face Representations

  • Familiar faces produce robust, viewpoint-tolerant representations built from many encounters.
  • Unfamiliar faces lack robust representations and are error-prone across changes in view or lighting.
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