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Mind-blowing. I wonder if they can do the same thing to a monkey that's sleeping and thus capture what faces a monkey sees in dreams?
They previously identified six "patches" in the monkey brain that are specialized for processing face-like stimuli. These are embedded in a much larger brain area involved in object recognition, but it's not clear whether faces are a special case or if other sorts of object patches remain to be discovered.
Why are human faces used on monkey subjects? How good are human at recognizing monkey faces?
Getting human trials is a significantly harder regulatory hurdle than monkey trials.
Wow, that's improved amazingly in quality since the last time I saw something similar. Then, the 'reconstructed faces' were blurry blobs that were barely recognizable as faces. These are great.
Wow, that's improved amazingly in quality since the last time I saw something similar. Then, the 'reconstructed faces' were blurry blobs that were barely recognizable as faces. These are great.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Getting human trials is a significantly harder regulatory hurdle than monkey trials.
Getting monkey faces, however....
Looking at those pictures, I'd say that the monkey brain puts on 10 lbs.
I wonder if different social animals will have biases for certain facial features unique to their species, similar to what the end of the video suggests. It is what I would expect if our visual information system does work like a covnet, since important higher but level features would be pushed further down the stack, and inputs from our eyes that are similar would be "boosted". But I imagine the truth is much more complicated.
Here they don't seem to be experiencing any "monkey-like" feature boosting, so the area they chose is either low level enough, this is not a real effect, or monkeys are similar enough to human faces to not learn different low level features.
Why are human faces used on monkey subjects? How good are human at recognizing monkey faces?
And vice-versa.
CalTech's statement on animal testing is on their website [1] though I'm always skeptical of "oversight" groups established by an industry itself, as are PETA [2].
[1]: https://iacuc.caltech.edu [2]: https://www.peta.org/blog/labs-gold-standard-seal-mean-anima...