Brain signals used to recreate photos of faces

• Autores: Andy Coghlan
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3129, 2017, pág. 14
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Precision images of real faces have been recreated by monitoring the activity of certain cells in the brains of macaque monkeys as they looked at photographs of people. The study is the first to provide a full and simple explanation of how the brains of macaques--and by implication, humans--generate composite images of any face they see. The brain has regions of specialized face cells, which become active when a person sees a face. Doris Tsao and her colleague, Steven Le Chang, inserted electrodes into three patches of these cells in macaques, enabling them to record the activity of 205 neurons. The pair then showed three of these macaques 2,000 images of human faces. They discovered that each of the face cells is tuned to view faces in slightly different ways--as if photographing a face from multiple angles at once. The combined signals from these cells encode 50 different aspects of a face. When all these are combined, they give a clear composite image.