The visual system is tuned for rapid detection of faces, with the fastest choice saccade to a face at 100 ms. Familiar faces have a more robust representation than do unfamiliar faces, and are detected faster in the absence of awareness and with reduced attentional resources. Faces of family and close friends become familiar over a protracted period involving learning the unique visual appearan...

A framework for designing a multiagent system (MAS) in which agents are capable of coordinating their activities in routine, familiar, and unfamiliar situations is proposed. This framework is based on the skills, rules and knowledge (S-R-K) taxonomy of Rasmussen. Thus, the proposed framework should allow agents to prefer the lower skill-based and rule-based levels rather than the higher knowled...

Many species use facial features to identify conspecifics, which is necessary to navigate a complex social environment. The fundamental mechanisms underlying face processing are starting to be well understood in a variety of primate species. However, most studies focus on a limited subset of species tested with unfamiliar faces. As well as limiting our understanding of how widely distributed ac...

BACKGROUND The Vegetative State (VS) is a severe disorder of consciousness in which patients are awake but display no signs of awareness. Yet, recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have demonstrated evidence for covert awareness in VS patients by recording specific brain activations during a cognitive task. However, the possible existence of incommunicable subjective emoti...

Understanding dogs' perceptual experience of both conspecifics and humans is important to understand how dogs evolved and the nature of their relationships with humans and other dogs. Olfaction is believed to be dogs' most powerful and perhaps important sense and an obvious place to begin for the study of social cognition of conspecifics and humans. We used fMRI in a cohort of dogs (N=12) that ...

This paper reports a treatment case study focused on face perception impairments designed for AL, an 8-year-old child with prosopagnosia. AL's prosopagnosia was characterized by deficits at the level of structural encoding-that is, he was unable to achieve normal basic perception of faces. This impairment then impacted on all subsequent aspects of familiar- and unfamiliar-face processing. Detai...