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schaefer

Please note: facial recognition is learned, not innate.

https://www.leafscience.org/visual-recognition/

Thanks.

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Some aspect of it must be innate, or it wouldn't be possible for people to have face blindness.

Not only that. From TFA:

  Prosopagnosia appears to be different from other 
  neurological memory problems because it doesn’t cause 
  any other issues with memory and isn’t always caused by 
  brain damage — as in my case, it can be developmental 
  and genetic.

@schaefer: "Thanks."

To some extent, all visual processing is learned. See, for example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2apb6d/til_t...

But, yes, you need that part of your brain to be functional to start with as a prerequisite.

That's specious reasoning: something being learnt doesn't mean that people can't have an adaptation that aids, or inhibits, that particular learning.

Running isn't innate, we learn to do it. Most children do it. But some people lack the apparatus, some are just habituated against it, some are impaired in other ways. And, running is a defining characteristic of humans. (It's not a perfect analogy but I think it fits)

This seems completely wrong to me. They are just showing that part of the brain that are not used during the infancy are not going to develop. We already knew that thanks to the studies on feral children, but it has nothing to do with their assertion that we are unable to recognise faces from the beginning and it is just a learned behaviour.

Not trying to bombard you but here is an article which includes a reference paper talking about the difference between the Macaque and Human brain (regarding attention—so not the same thing—I’ll see if I can find anything regarding more specific processing): https://www.theverge.com/2015/7/13/8951797/human-brain-atten...:

Thanks for the link. This doesn’t match up with a lot of anecdotal evidence in humans. If it is primarily learned it’s also possible that some people specialize in a different way which could be checked using real-time FMRI. Chimpanzees tend to be used for most comparisons to humans— I wonder why they used Macaques.

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