= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
billswift comments on Empiricism in Gameplay - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (32)
It is instinctual, not learned. Evolution chunked it, not you.
Can you unpack the distinction you are making by the words "instinctual" and "learned"?
I didn't see anything in the wiki article that David linked, or in the references available from it, to support David's and your assertion. The material says that we know where face recognition is done in the brain. This does not bear on the question of whether it is "instinctual" or "learned". Something that would bear on the question would be information about the degree to which the ability already exists at birth (one possible unpacking of "instinctual" vs. "learned"). I have heard of other research indicating that newborn babies have some face-recognition ability, but not of any assessment of how they compare with adult ability.
My google-fu is strong
I think what he's saying is that an instinctual pattern is one that is present in the brain without having been learned by prior exposure of that specific brain.
There's a possible confusion here in conflating the processes of distinguishing faces from non-faces and distinguishing between faces.
The claim that it's all hardcoded seems to apply to the second task (there's prosopagnosia -- lack of the specific ability to recognize faces). If Wikipedia is to be trusted, some neuroscientists argue that the ability to recognize faces is actually a learned specialization of a more general mechanism for recognizing very familiar objects (the section with that info is tagged as possibly violating neutral POV so it might not be trustworthy).
The post actually referred to recognizing the face-concept rather than a specific face. I'd guess that this is hardcoded to the extent that people rely on their specific facial-recognition module to alert them to the fact that they are seeing a face at all (hence, facial pareidolia) but people who lose that hardware can probably still learn to recognize occurrences of the 'face' category with their general object-recognition capabilities (quick googling didn't tell me whether people with prosopagnosia can do this).