There’s nothing quite like the rush of recognition that comes from seeing a familiar face. Scientists have found it very difficult to explain how we identify well-known faces — or how that process differs from the way we perceive unfamiliar ones.
They have long known that the brain contains a network of areas that respond selectively to faces as opposed to other kinds of objects like feet, cars, smartphones. They also knew that humans process familiar and unfamiliar faces very differently. For example, we excel at recognizing pictures of familiar faces even when they are shot in poor light or at odd angles. But we struggle to recognize even slightly altered images of the same face when it is unfamiliar to us: two pictures of a stranger we’ve never seen before, for instance, shown from different perspectives or in dim light.
Now researchers at The Rockefeller University have begun to unravel the mystery of how the brain recognizes familiar faces. They turned to macaques (猕猴), close evolutionary cousins whose face processing networks are better understood and more easily studied than our own.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (磁共振成像), Landi and Freiwald measured the animals’ brain activity as they responded to pictures of other monkeys’ faces. Those faces fell into three categories: personally familiar ones belonging to monkeys that the macaques had lived with for years; visually familiar ones whose pictures they had seen hundreds of times; and totally unfamiliar ones. For comparison’s sake, they also showed the monkeys pictures of personally familiar, visually familiar, and unfamiliar objects.
The researchers expected the macaque face processing network to respond in much the same way to the first two types of faces. But instead, the entire system showed more activity in response to the long-time personally familiar faces. Faces that were only visually familiar, meanwhile, caused a reduction of activity in some areas.
“The whole network somehow distinguishes personally familiar faces from visually familiar faces,” says Landi.
Even more surprisingly, the faces of animals whom the macaques had known for years caused the activation of two previously unknown face-selective areas.
One is located in a region of the brain associated with so-called declarative memory, which consists of facts and events that can be consciously recalled. The other area lies in a region associated with social knowledge, such as information about individuals and their position within a social class — “a specific form of memory,” Freiwald says, “that is highly developed in primates (灵长类动物), and certainly in humans.”
1. According to Paragraph 2, which of the following statements is true?| A．The network of areas in the brain can respond equally to faces and to other objects. |
| B．We can hardly identify the picture of people with makeup even if we know them well. |
| C．People are better at recognizing pictures of familiar faces than those of unfamiliar ones. |
| D．Pictures of familiar faces are hard to be recognized if they are taken in the dim light. |
| A．begin to fail or collapse |
| B．investigate something complicated |
| C．undo something to make it separated |
| D．unwind something wrapped around another object |
| A．You store some social knowledge in your declarative memory. |
| B．Your friends’ faces reduce the activity in some parts of the brain. |
| C．A passer-by’s face can activate two face-selective areas in your brain. |
| D．Your brain responds differently to your parents’ faces and to pop stars’ faces. |
| A．What face recognition is |
| B．How the brain recognizes familiar faces |
| C．What methods scientists use in the research |
| D．How people understand face processing network |
相似题推荐
【推荐1】Play Helps Develop Bigger, Better Brains!
If play is not simply a way to have fun, for what other reasons has it developed?
According to John Byers of Idaho University, the timing of the playful stage in young animals provides an important clue to what’s going on. If you plot the amount of time a child devotes to play each day over the course of his development, you discover a pattern typically associated with a “sensitive period”—a brief development window during which the brain can actually be adjusted in ways that are not possible earlier or later in life.
“People have not paid enough attention to the amount of the brain activated by play,” says Marc Bekoff from Colorado University. Bekoff studied coyote pups at play and found that the kind of behavior involved was obviously more variable and unpredictable than that of adults. He also reasons that such behavior activates many different parts of the brain.
| A．Play just lights everything up. |
| B．The importance of playfulness is drawing more attention. |
| C．The latest idea suggests that play has developed to build big brains. |
| D．A popular explanation is that it helps children develop the skills they will later need. |
| E．Think of the relative ease with which kids—but not babies or adults—absorb language. |
| F．Not only is more of the brain involved in play, but it also activates higher cognitive processes. |
| G．Comparing fifteen orders of mammals, his team found larger brains are linked to greater playfulness. |
【推荐2】There are many fascinating aspects of ant life, but none may be a more practical lesson for us than their gift for avoiding traffic jams.
A new research paper published in the journal eLife reveals how ants keep traffic flowing by changing their behavior to meet changing conditions. For their experiments, researchers from the University of Toulouse and the University of Arizona focused on Argentine ants that frequently move from one colony (聚居地) to another depending on the proximity of food sources.
Exploring the Argentine ants’ gift for fast commutes, the researchers built bridges connecting their colonies. The bridges varied in width from a fifth to three-quarters of an inch. The colonies, too, were of different sizes, ranging from 400 to more than 25,00 ants, Essentially, researchers built a new infrastructure (基础设施) system for the ants, connecting their biggest cities to the smallest villages. Then they sat back and monitored the traffic.
To their surprise, even when those narrower bridges reached near capacity, there were no 20-ant pile -ups. Indeed, there was never a hold-up. Traffic remained steady regardless of how overburdened the infrastructure was because ants were able to adjust to the change of road conditions. At some point, when the bridges got really busy, ants moved not so much as individuals but rather like water flowing in an ever widening stream.
“When density on the trail increased, ants seemed to be able to assess crowding locally and adjusted their speed accordingly to avoid any interruption of traffic flow,” the authors note in a news release.“Moreover, ants kept themselves from entering a crowded path and ensured that the capacity of the bridge was never exceeded.”Argentine ants are extremely effective in getting to where they need to be in a hurry.
The lesson for humans? The traffic problem may lie in our inability to adjust our driving habits for the good of the whole.“Traffic jams are everywhere in human society where individuals are pursuing their own personal objectives,” the authors write.“In contrast, ants share a common goal; the survival of the colony, thus they are expected to act cooperatively to optimize (优化) food return.
1. How do the ants keep traffic flowing?| A．By adjusting to the road conditions. | B．By monitoring the traffic flow. |
| C．By communicating with each other. | D．By building their own paths. |
| A．They scrambled to pass automatically. | B．They flowed in the stream constantly. |
| C．They changed their speed accordingly. | D．They moved on individually in a hurry. |
| A．To raise traffic safety awareness. | B．To find solutions to present problems. |
| C．To give up individuals’ ambitions, | D．To act for the good of the whole society. |
| A．Argentine Ants Move On the Roads | B．Explore Interesting Ants’ Gifts |
| C．Watch Ants Cross the Roads | D．Ants Teach Us How to Avoid Traffic Jams |
【推荐3】Who are better leaders?
Have you ever considered what the most popular personality type is: being an extrovert (外向的人) or being an introvert (内向的人) ? It is hard to say. Each of these identities has its own strengths and weaknesses.
" To be more extroverted might require initiating conversation or making small talk," says Alisa Cohn, a coach from New York City." I like the idea of practicing such behavior three, four, five times a day in microdoses (微量).
| A．Well, who are more successful at work? |
| B．Is it possible to change your personality? |
| C．Little by little, you' ll find it easier to achieve that. |
| D．For extroverts, this may mean being quieter in meetings. |
| E．This doesn't mean that introverts aren't happy and relaxed. |
| F．Then you can watch their behavior and model yourself after them. |
| G．However, it seems that there's constant debate about which is better. |
During the 1960s and 1970s, Hippies made bell—bottomed blue jeans（喇叭裤）popular. Also, in the 1980s, Michael Jackson made parachute pants（降落伞裤）all the fashion. Now try to find these items in today’s clothing stores!
Do you know why fashions change？The answer is probably as simple as the fact that people change. Over time, the new replaces the old. People are influenced greatly by popular culture, including athletes, musicians, movies stars, as well as popular films, television shows, books and music. We are also influenced by the fashion industry’s advertising.
The stars of popular culture are always searching for a new angle to maintain（保持）their popularity. Often these new angles come in the form of new clothing or hairstyles. When people see these new styles, they often want to imitate(模仿) their favorite stars. To do so, they seek out the latest fashions to make themselves look like the people they want to imitate. In this way, fashions evolve and change over time.
Clothes have been used to separate people into groups for many years. Even today, brand-name, clothing that is more expensive than other types of clothing can be used by some people to make themselves different from others.
Unfortunately, this can often have the effect of distancing certain groups from others. Don’t forget that it’s always OK to develop your own sense of style that is unique and separate from what the fashion world determines! Stay true to yourself and let your personality — not your clothes — speak for who you are!
1. What does the example of bell—bottomed blue jeans and parachute pants in Paragraph 2 suggest?
| A．Fashion always changes. |
| B．Stars are always influential. |
| C．People have different dressing styles. |
| D．Hippies and Michael Jackson are good designers. |
| A．Advertisements change rapidly. |
| B．Popular culture influences people. |
| C．Movie stars are changing over time. |
| D．New films and shows replace the old. |
| A．fashion is all about clothes. |
| B．the author has gone out of fashion. |
| C．clothes may separate and distance people. |
| D．people like imitate others’ dressing style. |
| A．The advantages of staying unique. |
| B．The bad effects of following fashion. |
| C．The good influences of popular styles. |
| D．The importance of having one’s own personality. |
【推荐2】Elderly people may struggle to sleep as well as they did during their youth because they start to lose part of the brain that helps them fall asleep, scientists believe. There seem to be two main difficulties: falling asleep at the start of the night and then waking up too early in the morning—yet finding it almost impossible to get back to sleep.
Researchers have found out a group of cells in the human brain which block off conscious(有意识的) thoughts, allowing us to sleep. They think these neurons(神经元) gradually break up as we age, leading to greater sleep problems in later life.
Clifford Saper, a professor from Harvard Medical School in the US who led the research, said, “On average, a person in his 70s has about one hour less sleep per night than a person in his 20s. The loss of these neurons with aging may be an important reason why older people often face sleep interruptions.”
Professor Saper's team discovered a group of neurons—the ventrolateral preoptic nucleus(腹外侧视前核)—were functioning as a sleep switch in rats. They then found the same process was happening in humans. The cells turned off the brain's arousal(唤醒) systems to enable the animals to fall asleep.
Professor Saper said, “Our experiments in animals showed that the loss of these neurons produced severe sleeplessness, with animals sleeping only about 50 percent as much as normal and their remaining sleep being interrupted.” A group of ventrolateral preoptic nuclei in the human brain are found in a similar location and have the same chemical makeup as that found in rats.
The researchers analyzed data from 45 elderly people and found people with fewer neurons in the “sleep switch” area were more likely to have sleepless nights.
“The fewer the neurons, the more broken the sleep became. These findings provide the first evidence that the ventrolateral preoptic nucleus in humans probably plays a key role in causing sleep. These results may, therefore, lead to new methods to deal with sleep problems in the elderly，” Professor Saper said.
1. One sleeping problem the elderly people have is that ________.| A．they can't fall asleep at night |
| B．they often wake up too early in the morning |
| C．they can't fall asleep till late into the night |
| D．they often have terrible dreams while asleep |
| A．The elderly usually have fewer ventrolateral preoptic nuclei than the young. |
| B．On average, a person in his 70s has only about one hour's sleep per night. |
| C．One's sleep quality is closely connected with the living environment. |
| D．The rats in the experiment suffered from serious sleeping difficulty. |
| A．introduce ways to deal with sleeping trouble |
| B．help the elderly improve their sleep quality |
| C．explain the main difficulties that the elderly have |
| D．inform readers of the findings of an experiment |
【推荐3】Characters in novels don't always do what the writer wants them to do. Sometimes they cause trouble，take on lives of their own, or even work against the writer. It's not just a problem for inexperienced authors: famed children's novelist Roald Dahl said he got the main character in his book Matilda so “wrong” that when he'd finished his first version, he threw it away and started again.
Of course it's not the characters' fault. The problem lies with the author. Take Stephen King, who admitted that writing working-class characters is more difficult nowadays because his own circumstances have changed. “It is definitely harder,” King said. “When I wrote Carrie many years ago, I was one step away from physical labour.”
This is also true for characters' ages, added King. “When you have small children, it is easy to write young characters because you observe them and you have them in your life all the time. But your kids grow up. It's been harder for me to write about this little 12-year-old girl in my new book because my models are gone.”
For other authors, such as Karen Fowler, there's one quality that can stop a character in its tracks: “boredom”. “I had particular problems with the main character in my historical novel Sister Noon." she says.” She had attitudes about race and religion that seemed appropriate to me for her time and class, but they were not attitudes I liked. Eventually I grew quite bored with her. You can write a book about a character you dislike or a character you disagree with, but I don't think you can write a book about a character who bores you.”
According to Neel Mukherjee, it was Adinath, a character in The Lives of Others, who made him work the hardest. “I think I struggled because it's difficult to write a character whose most prominent personal feature is weakness, as Adinath's is, without making that feature define him,” Mukherjee says. But a troublesome character is far from an unwelcome guest, he continues, arguing that “when characters work against the author they come alive and become unpredictable.”
“That is a fantastic thing to happen, ”Mukherjee says, “I celebrate it. It is one of the great, lucky gifts given to a writer.”
1. What can we infer about Steven King's book Carrie?| A．It was his most difficult book to write. | B．It was the first successful novel King wrote. |
| C．There were few children featured in the story. | D．Some of its main characters were working class. |
| A．She disagreed with the character's attitudes. | B．The age difference between the two was too large. |
| C．She found the character very uninteresting. | D．The historical setting made accuracy difficult. |
| A．are a sign that the story is not realistic | B．are often the most interesting |
| C．should be praised by all authors | D．need to be researched more thoroughly |
| A．famous and successful | B．unknown to the readers |
| C．all from the same country | D．just starting their writing careers |
| A．Karen Fowler becomes bored with her characters because she disagrees with their class and time. |
| B．Mukherjee considers a troublesome character as an unwelcomed guest because their weakness. |
| C．Working class characters are more difficult to write than figures from other background. |
| D．Characters are easier to depict if you have models in your real life. |
