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Complementary image processing in the cerebral hemispheres by ferujkll sdff
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Complementary image processing in the cerebral hemispheres |
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The left brain/right brain dichotomy has been prominent on the poppsychology scene since Nobel Laureate Roger Sperry broached thesubject in the 1960s. The left is analytical while the right iscreative, so goes the adage. And then there is the quasi-scientific obsession with "the face."Facial recognition technology and facial microexpressions are thestuff of television crime dramas, such as Person of Interest andLie to Me. But Ming Meng, an assistant professor in the Department ofPsychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College, has broughtthese two together in a way that offers new insights into theorganization of the brain with implications for autism.
Meng and his colleagues have published their findings January 4 inthe online edition of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B (Biological Sciences). Meng's novel approach is to combine functional magnetic resonanceimaging (fMRI), computer vision, and psychophysics to take ourunderstanding of brain function in a new direction. He was able toassign distinct complementary aspects of visual informationprocessing to each side of the brain. Meng is interested inperception and considers vision its major domain. His researchfocuses on how the brain is organized to process visualinformation.
The traditional approach to visual information processing has beento view it as an ordered sequence. In the early stages ofprocessing, the right side of the brain was thought to process theleft visual field and vice versa, whereas in later stages ofprocessing the right and the left brain process the whole visualfield in parallel. "I find such organization puzzling in terms of efficiency with bothparts of the brain effectively processing the same thing - a wasteof resources," says Meng. Instead, he proposes a division of laborwith right side and left doing different things.
Looking at how the brain processes faces is Meng's key to unlockingthe mysteries of the left brain/right brain paradigm. The left and right fusiform gyri (spindle-shaped sections) of thetemporal lobes were known to be the places where facial stimuliwere processed, and Meng homed in here. "I wondered what thedifference might be between the left brain and the right inprocessing the human face and this was the place to look," he says. But first he looked to computer-generated images for hisexperimental materials.
Meng felt that fMRI measurement of his testsubjects' reactions only to images of faces versus non-facesoffered too coarse a distinction. "We needed to study the full spectrum, the stimuli that makes animage look like a face but not necessarily a face. These resultswould show the subtle differences between the left and right sideof the brain as they dealt with this range of images," he explains.A computer algorithm generated the desired range of images that hethen showed to his test subjects while taking fMRI measurements oftheir brain activity. Using psychophysics as behavioral testing tools, Meng analyzed thespectrum from random non-faces to genuine faces. "We were able to systematically quantify the face-semblance of eachof our stimuli (images).
This is important because otherwise wewould only have an oversimplified 'black-white' distinction betweenfaces and non-faces, which would not be particularly useful todifferentiate the functional roles of the left and righthemispheres," Meng explains. "Only with the psychophysical face-semblance ratings, we've foundthat the left is involved in the graded analysis of the visualstimuli. Our results suggest the left side of the brain isprocessing the external physical input which resolves into a 'greyscale' while the right brain is underlying the final decision ofwhether or not it is a face." Application of Meng's tripartite methodology that has shown thedifferences in the left brain/right brain picture could provide atemplate for studying patients with face processing deficits, aswell as a new frame of reference for autism. Faces constitute a particular challenge for autistic children.
Theytypically avoid eye contact, diverting their gaze from anotherperson's face. Meng suggests that, "the underlying reason for theirproblems with social interaction may be correlated to theirproblems with face perception." Knowing the organization of face processing mechanisms in normalindividuals provides a good starting point for exploring how thisorganization might be different in people with autism. Additional References Citations. I am Telecommunications writer, reports some information about telephone wall jack , telephone modular jack.
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