Study uses brain scans to discover how children 'read' faces

November 20, 2009
Study uses brain scans to discover how children 'read' faces

Researcher Banu Ahtam guides 9 year old Oscar Nathan through the study.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Oxford University scientists are using brain-scanning technology to understand how we learn to recognise and 'read' faces as children.

The research will also investigate whether there are any differences in the way people with autism spectrum disorders respond to seeing faces.

‘Faces are really very similar in their basic features, but we are very good at recognising different faces instantly. The brain has to be very specialised to be able to do this quickly and accurately,’ says Dr Jennifer Swettenham, who is leading the study.

The ability to recognise faces is very important for communication and socialising. We need to be able to recognise people’s , and also understand their emotions, respond to where they are looking, and many other signs and indications.

‘If there’s a problem with the way the brain processes faces then this can have profound impact on people’s ability to understand social situations,’ says Dr Swettenham. ‘There is a lot of evidence to suggest that people with have difficulty with processing faces.’

Psychologists in the Oxford Autism Research Group are using a technique called magnetoencephalography (MEG) to map in children of different ages when they are shown photos of different things. The researchers aim to discover when our brains become specialised to ‘see’ faces. They will also compare children with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to see if the development of these brain responses is affected by ASD.

Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is a non-invasive technique that uses sensors to record magnetic activity produced by active , or neurons, in the brain. Children sit on a chair with their head surrounded by the sensors, but they are not in an enclosed space like MRI scans and MEG does not make a noise, unlike MRI.

‘We hope this research will help us understand more about autism spectrum disorder and about ,’ says Dr Swettenham.

The researchers aim to involve 96 children aged between 5 and 16, with and without autism spectrum disorder, in the study.

Provided by Oxford University (news : web)

Filter


Move the slider to adjust rank threshold, so that you can hide some of the comments.


Display comments: newest first

Super_Ego
Nov 21, 2009

Rank: not rated yet
Have they investigated this in light of mirror neurons?
Rank not rated yet
Relevant PhysicsForums posts
  • Is Everyday Technology Killing Us?
    createdFeb 08, 2012
  • Exercise and weight loss
    createdFeb 08, 2012
  • Why do we have head aches? Our brains can't feel anything.
    createdFeb 07, 2012
  • "The end of diseases" by David Agus, interview from Daily Show with Jon Stewart
    createdFeb 04, 2012
  • Oncolytic adenovirus
    createdFeb 04, 2012
  • Nutrition label stuffs and diets
    createdFeb 02, 2012
  • More from Physics Forums - Medical Sciences

More news stories

Human cognitive performance suffers following natural disasters, researchers find

Not surprisingly, victims of a natural disaster can experience stress and anxiety, but a new study indicates that it might also cause them to make more errors - some serious - in their daily lives. In their upcoming Human Fa ...

Medicine & Health / Psychology & Psychiatry

created 1 hour ago | popularity not rated yet | comments 0

Both maternal and paternal age linked to autism

Older maternal and paternal age are jointly associated with having a child with autism, according to a recently published study led by researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth).

Medicine & Health / Psychology & Psychiatry

created 4 hours ago | popularity not rated yet | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Curry spice component may help slow prostate tumor growth

Curcumin, an active component of the Indian curry spice turmeric, may help slow down tumor growth in castration-resistant prostate cancer patients on androgen deprivation therapy (ADT), a study from researchers ...

Medicine & Health / Cancer

created 5 hours ago | popularity 5 / 5 (3) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Team isolates nerve cells involved in storing long term memory and gene proteins associated with them

(Medical Xpress) -- A research team in Taiwan has succeeded in isolating two nerve cells in fruit fly brains that are believed to be the major players in allowing for the formation of long term memories. Furthermore, ...

Medicine & Health / Neuroscience

created 6 hours ago | popularity 5 / 5 (4) | comments 1 | with audio podcast report

Seeing colors in music, tasting flavors in shapes may happen in life's early months

Famed violinist Itzhak Perlman sees a deep forest green whenever he plays a B-flat on his Stradivarius' G string. The A on the E string is red.

Medicine & Health / Psychology & Psychiatry

created 7 hours ago | popularity 4.5 / 5 (2) | comments 1 | with audio podcast


The power of estrogen -- male snakes attract other males

A new study has shown that boosting the estrogen levels of male garter snakes causes them to secrete the same pheromones that females use to attract suitors, and turned the males into just about the sexiest ...

New error-correcting codes guarantee the fastest possible rate of data transmission

Error-correcting codes are one of the triumphs of the digital age. They’re a way of encoding information so that it can be transmitted across a communication channel — such as an optical fiber o ...

Putting the squeeze on planets outside our solar system

(PhysOrg.com) -- Using high-powered lasers, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and collaborators discovered that molten magnesium silicate undergoes a phase change in the liquid state, abruptly ...

Humans may have helped the decline of African rainforests 3000 years ago

(PhysOrg.com) -- Large areas of rainforests in Central Africa mysteriously disappeared over three thousand years ago, to be replaced by savannas. The prevailing theory has been that the cause was a change ...

Fool's gold may prove an unlikely alternative to overexploited catalytic materials

Catalytic materials, which lower the energy barriers for chemical reactions, are used in everything from the commercial production of chemicals to catalytic converters in car engines. However, with current catalytic materials ...

Could Venus be shifting gear?

(PhysOrg.com) -- ESA’s Venus Express spacecraft has discovered that our cloud-covered neighbour spins a little slower than previously measured. Peering through the dense atmosphere in the infrared, the ...