RSVP: Not required
When: Every 2nd Wednesday of the month, 3:00-5:00 pm
Where: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83181995566
Open to: All
Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible
TRACKING FACE BLINDNESS USING CITIZEN SCIENCE
Do you have trouble recognizing familiar faces? not names (this is a problem for everybody), but faces. It turns out that maybe 1 in fifty people are truly disadvantaged here. This condition is called prosopagnosia. Some of this is the result of brain damage but most instances seem to occur with no obvious pathology. The latter cases include the well-known author Oliver Sacks (see below). Ken Nakayama and colleagues set up a website (below) to which thousands of people joined. From this, they were able to recruit and test such persons and to characterize this deficit. Possibly related to specialized face processing areas in the brain, they showed that face recognition ability is likely to be inherited (twin studies), that it continues to improve up to age 32, and that it is unrelated to other more general cognitive capacities.
Ashby Village member Ken Nakayama will explain this interesting phenomenon.
After being marooned in Newfoundland for two years, Ken was fortunate come to the Smith Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco, staying there for 19 years. This was followed by a 27 year career as a Professor in the Psychology Department, Harvard University. Arriving back in the Bay Area and now affiliated with UC Berkeley, he is still active. His main field has been the Visual System, starting from recording from single nerve cells in the retina then gradually becoming more interested in human visual psychology. He has been fortunate in having many talented students and his work on face blindness (aka prosopagnosia) has been one of the various projects conducted at Harvard. It was an interesting adventure and he had the chance to be on National TV (famous for 15 min!). He is no longer active in this research area but keeps in touch with former students.
See website that he started, now run out of Dartmouth College
https://www.faceblind.org/
New Yorker Article by Oliver Sacks
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/30/face-blind
Most fun and useful, you can take two face tests, keep track of your score
Takes about 25 min – the most important is the second test. So be patient.
Get your score and write it down and we can discuss it during the talk
Sorry, the first test is about “famous” people you may not know.
https://www.testmybrain.org/setup_restart.php?b=1048
TRACKING FACE BLINDNESS USING CITIZEN SCIENCE
Time: Jul 8, 2020 03:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
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Meeting ID: 831 8199 5566
Join a dynamic group of individuals who enjoy sharing and discussing science-focused topics. Each month the group selects a new topic to focus on via their online email forum. Speakers and/or readings often support the lively discussions.