Limbic System Research Paper

This double dissociation therefore suggests that recognition of faces and common objects is served by different mechanisms that are independent for each other. Although brain cells of face recognition have not been located, some functional models could help us interpret face recognition and prosopagnosia. One of the most influential models was proposed by Bruce and Young (1986). In this model face recognition involves several steps, and three steps more relate to prosopagnosia.

There are several different types of psychological and neurological phenomena that individuals live with every day. One of most interesting conditions that many individuals might not be aware of is prosopagnosia or face blindness. Prosopagnosia is the inability to recognize and distinguish faces. For example, individuals with this condition could have difficulty recognizing their child’s, spouse’s, parent’s, or friend’s face. Many individuals with prosopagnosia will rely on other features to distinguish between other people, such as hair style or color, voices, or posture. As discussed in Chapter 3, prosopagnosia is thought to affect the Fusiform Face Area.

The limbic system (or Paleomammalian brain) is a set of brain structures including the hippocampus, amygdala, anterior thalamic nuclei, and limbic cortex, which support a variety of functions including emotion, behavior, long term memory, and olfaction.[1] The term "limbic" comes from Latin limbus, loosely translating as "border" or "belt".

The most modern evidence comes from neuroimaging. The N170 ERP was instrumental in highlighting brain activation when viewing face stimuli. The activation patterns helped to locate the fusiform face area (FFA) because N170 was so distinct to faces. In this essay the fMRI research into the FFA will be explored in detail. To prove faces are special, the research aimed to find a correlation between distinct face-processing brain activity and a specific brain region. The FFA was discovered in 1997 by Kanwisher. It was first described as a brain region which only responded to faces. In fact, activation was found for cat faces and cartoon faces (Tong et al, 2000). There was also some very low level activation to animals, houses and

Bruce and Young’s theory of recognition tells us that human’s extract several kinds of information from faces; and that there are eight different components of such information. Such as structural encoding, expression analysis, facial speech analysis, directed visual processing, face recognition nodes,

B efore marriage, love or even dating, there is attraction, the unexpected force that draws two people together. Physical attractiveness is the physical traits which are perceived and believed to be aesthetically pleasing or beautiful. There are multiple factors which influence one person to be attracted to another. These factors can vary between many cultures, cultural and social aspects, and individual subjective preferences (Gangestad & Scyheyd, 2005). An individuals perceived attractiveness can have a significant effect on how they are judged in terms of employment or social opportunities, friendship, sexual behavior, and marriage (Townsend & Levy, 1990).

Overly, the model provides coherent explanation of many kind of information about faces and how they relate to each other. It provides evidence about significant differences in processing of familiar and unfamiliar faces. Nonetheless there are limitations. For instance, there is not enough information about processing unfamiliar faces. Burton et al. (1999)

It has been shown that the human amygdala is necessary for recognising emotion, and damage in this area can cause an individual to experience lack of facial recognition and the inability to understand emotions such as fear. Although this is true, damage to the amygdala does not appear to cause difficulty in recognising facial identity (Adolphs et al, 1994). This essay will discuss the importance of the human amygdala, and what an individual can experience if this part of the brain is damaged.

It reinforces our understanding of how we mentally judge/assess people using "snap" and "systematic" judgements. The article shows that goodlooking people are attracted to other goodlooking people most likely because they subconsiously trust them and feel like they are virtuous people based on their looks because of the social stereotype and perceiver expectation that reinforce that thinking. On the other hand, the article and the experiments reinforce our understanding that when two people are friends for a relatively long time, they move onto "systematic" judgements that allow them to make more in-depth and more accurate evaluation of each other. They do so by observing the behaviour and understanding the motives, thoughts and feelings of

Even compensatory strategies, such as recognising an individual by their hairstyle or gait, may be rendered ineffective, if a known individual appears in a new context or has changed some aspect of their appearance. Despite prosopagnosia being of an obvious disadvantage to the sufferer, it does allow for the investigation of components involved in normal face processing. By comparing the retained perceptual functions in a prosopagnosiac to those of an individual with ordinary face processing, it can be theorised which mechanisms work independently within face processing. Therefore, this essay will comment on three key distinctions which have been made about normal face processing, based on the research into prosopagnosia: the distinction between the systems involved in face and object processing; the distinction between the emotional response and conscious response of recognising faces; the distinction between the areas involved in recognising facial identity and facial

One of the most accepted theories on face processing involves holistic face perception in which faces are recognized as a conceptual whole, by integration of spatial relations among facial components and featural information into one representation.

The human face is dynamically expressive. With the forty-two muscles of the face constantly moving, minute variations in expression can convey an expansive breadth of emotion. Despite this, some individuals seem to be able to utilize these muscles far better than others. Some individuals naturally seem to emit more emotional exuberance through their face, than others. Thus, an inquiry into the perceived degrees of emotions conjured on an individual’s face could have vast implications. Ebner, He & Johnson (2011) conducted an experiment, which sought to test our cognitive system’s sensitivity to the differences in the levels of emotion that younger faces conveyed, when compared to older faces. They

In the no image condition participants encoded faces and names as separate units. For the image condition subjects formed visual image associations

The limbic system links together a bunch of brain structures that control our emotional responses, such as feeling

What is beauty? How do we decide who is attractive and who is not? Society is full of information telling us what is beautiful, but what fact is that information based on? The topic of beauty has been studied, analyzed and controversial for centuries. We all know the feeling you can have when you hear a beautiful song that brings joy to your heart, stand in a field of flowers that excites your eyes, or admire a face that is visually pleasing. As human beings, we are all drawn to beauty, but what is it that makes something beautiful? The controversial issue that surrounds beauty is that some believe that true beauty is defined by someone’s outer appearance, while others believe it is something that is experienced through a person’s