Human Brain Study Reveals Facial Recognition Development

Researcher shows the child images of his brain just taken on the MRI machine. Credit: Jesse Gomez and Kalanit Grill-Spector at the Vision and Perception Neuroscience Lab.

Study in a Sentence
Researchers recently used donated brain tissue and neuroimaging to measure brain activity and changes in brain structures in 22 live children and 25 live adults to show that the region of the brain responsible for facial recognition called the fusiform gyrus actually grows in mass rather than getting trimmed as facial recognition develops with age.

Healthy for Humans
Understanding how the human brain changes with skill development such as facial recognition may offer insights into developing novel diagnostic and therapeutic strategies for brain disorders that affect facial recognition, such as facial blindness resulting from stroke, traumatic brain injury, or neurodegenerative disorders.     

Redefining Research
The human brain exhibits many structural and functional differences from animals, as illustrated by the lack of the fusiform gyrus in lower form animals. This study demonstrated that brain tissue growth can be measured in live humans with advance imaging techniques and dead human tissues and illustrates how studying the brain in humans can yield novel insights that dispelled prior assumptions or generalizations about brain development concluded from animal studies.