A recent study from the University of Trento has brought new evidence to the debate about whether the brain is biologically predisposed to recognize faces or whether this ability is acquired.
This research, carried out at the Mind and Brain Sciences Center (CIMEC), has identified in chicks just one week old a specific neuronal reaction to visual stimuli that simulate a face, composed of three points that resemble eyes. and a beak or mouth.
What is notable is that these animals, which had never been exposed to faces before, do not react to isolated facial features or randomly arranged points. These findings reinforce the hypothesis that Facial recognition is an innate mechanism of the brain, rather than a skill acquired through experience.
This discovery adds to other previous studies that already suggested an innate predisposition in the brain to recognize faces. Research with human newborns and newly hatched chicks has shown that these, without having had prior exposure to faces, show a spontaneous attraction to visual stimuli that imitate faces.
In these cases, the schematic faces are composed of three characteristics: two eyes and a mouth or beak, which indicates that the brain could be designed from birth to recognize these types of visual configurations. However, before this study, the neural mechanism supporting this ability was not known.
The team at the University of Trento, led by Giorgio Vallortigara, carried out controlled experiments using simplified representations of faces in different configurations.
The key is in the prefrontal cortex
The results revealed that a specific population of neurons in the chicks’ brain, located in the “caudolateral nidopallium”—an area that in birds is equivalent to the prefrontal cortex in mammals—reacted only to stimuli that simulated a face, ignoring configurations in which the points were disordered or mixed up.
These findings not only contribute to the understanding of facial recognition in animals and humans, but also explain psychological phenomena such as “pareidolia,” the tendency to see faces in inanimate objects, such as clouds or stains on walls.
According to Vallortigara, this phenomenon is the product of a brain mechanism that responds automatically to simple configurations of points that simulate facial features, even though they are not really faces. This process reflects the brain’s innate ability to identify relevant stimuli in the environment, even in the absence of real faces.
The study proposes that this innate sensitivity to facial stimuli has a crucial evolutionary function. In the first days of life, both human chicks and babies seem to be drawn to these basic visual schemes of three dark spots arranged in an inverted triangle.
This allows them, over time, to learn to differentiate the faces of their caregivers from those of other individuals. This process, facilitated by specialized neurons, acts as a “face detector,” allowing animals to quickly identify their mothers or important members of their social group, which is vital for their survival.
This work, in addition to shedding light on the innate mechanisms of the brain, opens new avenues of research into how complex cognitive abilities, such as facial recognition, develop and evolve in vertebrates.
The results of the study are a significant advance in the field of neuroscience and provide a solid foundation for future research into the relationship between biology and social behavior.
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