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Fnord666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

MIT researchers and their colleagues have developed a new computational model of the human brain's face-recognition mechanism [phys.org]that seems to capture aspects of human neurology that previous models have missed.

The researchers designed a machine-learning system that implemented their model, and they trained it to recognize particular faces by feeding it a battery of sample images. They found that the trained system included an intermediate processing step that represented a face's degree of rotation—say, 45 degrees from center—but not the direction—left or right.

This property wasn't built into the system; it emerged spontaneously from the training process. But it duplicates an experimentally observed feature of the primate face-processing mechanism. The researchers consider this an indication that their system and the brain are doing something similar.

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