Distorting Face Representations in Newborn Brains

Simulating newborn face perception.

A frequently asked question concerns what a newborn infant can actually see. The contrast sensitivity function of newborn infants is well known, but its implications for the ability of newborns to perceive faces of adults remain unclear. We filtered gray scale animations of facial expressions in terms of both spatial frequency and contrast to correspond to the properties of newborn infants' acu...

Stable face representations.

Photographs are often used to establish the identity of an individual or to verify that they are who they claim to be. Yet, recent research shows that it is surprisingly difficult to match a photo to a face. Neither humans nor machines can perform this task reliably. Although human perceivers are good at matching familiar faces, performance with unfamiliar faces is strikingly poor. The situatio...

Neural representations of close others in collectivistic brains.

Our recent work showed that close relationships result in shared cognitive and neural representations of the self and one's mother in collectivistic individuals (Zhu et al., 2007, Neuroimage, 34, 1310-7). However, it remains unknown whether close others, such as mother, father and best friend, are differentially represented in collectivistic brains. Here, using functional magnetic resonance ima...

Distorting Reason

Unsupervised Learning of Face Representations

We present an approach for unsupervised training of CNNs in order to learn discriminative face representations. We mine supervised training data by noting that multiple faces in the same video frame must belong to different persons and the same face tracked across multiple frames must belong to the same person. We obtain millions of face pairs from hundreds of videos without using any manual su...