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Comment by henriquemaia | Hacker News Reader

> Somehow, his brain was still processing and identifying a face—a fairly high-level skill—even though his conscious mind was oblivious.

I'm maybe wrong about this, but isn't the ability to recognize faces a fairly low-level skill? Case is point being other social animals having it, like apes, monkeys, or even sheep [1] (who can even recognize human faces [2]).

So maybe they're here referring to the ability of seeing representations of faces (little faces on the letters). Or is this just a blunder of the person who wrote the sciencemag article?

[^1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1641463.stm [^2] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-41905652

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The paper describes “event-related potential (ERP)” [1] measured via EEG.

“The N170 is a component of the event-related potential (ERP) that reflects the neural processing of faces, familiar objects or words.” [2]

They also measured the inverse of recognition “...improbable events will elicit a P3b, and the less probable the event, the larger the P3b.” [3]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event-related_potential

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/N170

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3b

There is a difference between “low level” and “human specific”. Faces are highly complex geometrically, while numbers, such as 8, are simple. Animals sure can recognise simple shapes (https://docsmith.co/2007/01/can-animals-recognize-shapes/), but they cannot endow them with abstract meanings, such as "number 8". The person in the article lost the basic ability of recognising very simple shapes while still being able to recognise more complex shapes, like faces, and to operate with abstract concepts.

Babies can recognise faces so I would definitely class it as low-level. Anything you can do as a baby is low-level.

High-level are things like reading and writing that are learned rather than evolved.

Good point. So whoever wrote that got it wrong, right?

Recognizing faces is the highest level of visual processing. The lowest levels are detecting regions of contrast, lines, then orientations of lines...

[Textbook](https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Vision-Introduction-Visual-Perc...)

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