I see myself ? Learning by doing

own face, although children do not develop self-recognition before the age of about 18 months. Self-face recognition is clearly a high-level ability and might be an important component of self-awareness1. The question of how the brain responds to the sight of one’s own face has recently been tackled by Kircher and colleagues2. They used computerized morphing procedures to blend a photograph of the subject’s own face and a photograph of another highly familiar face – that of the subject’s partner – with the face of a stranger. They first measured the response times for discriminating these morphed faces compared with the unmorphed faces. Unsurprisingly, recognition was significantly slower the more the subject’s own or their partner’s face was merged with the stranger’s face. However, there was no difference in the reaction times for recognizing one’s own and one’s partner’s face. In a second experiment the authors used fMRI to scan subjects while they viewed morphed versions of their own or their partner’s face. The results showed increased brain activity in the right limbic system, the left prefrontal cortex and the superior temporal cortex when subjects viewed their own face (compared with viewing a control stranger’s face). By contrast, when the subjects viewed their partner’s face, only the right insula was activated. The right limbic areas have been shown to be involved with autobiographical memories3, and Kircher et al. suggest that the right limbic activity might represent the emotional reaction to seeing one’s own face. They propose that this region, together with the left prefrontal cortex, which is thought to play a role in integrating multi-sensory information into a coherent whole, might underlie human selfrecognition and self-awreness. This contrasts with other evidence that the right prefrontal cortex may play a greater role in this faculty than the left1.