4. Special Part of the Brain Just for Recognizing Faces

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There is a special part of the brain outside the visual cortex whose sole purpose is to recognize faces. Identified by Nancy Kanwisher (1997), the fusiform face area (FFA) allows faces to bypass the brain’s usual interpretive channels and helps us identify them more quickly than objects. The FFA is also near the amygdala, the brain’s emotional center.

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Research by Catherine Mondloch et al. (1999) shows that newborns less than an hour old prefer looking at something that

has facial features.

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People recognize and react to faces on Web pages faster than anything else on the page (at least by those who are not autistic).

Faces looking right at people will have the greatest emotional impact on a Web page, probably because the eyes are the most important part of the face.

If a face on a Web page looks at another spot or product on the page, people will also tend to look at that product. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they paid attention to it, just that they physically looked at it.