Faces are so important for human social interactions that our brains contain a region that is specialised for processing them. This region, the fusiform face area, lies on the lower surface of the temporal lobe, and is thought to be unique to humans and other primates. Our childhood ability to recognize faces improves as we get older, in line with development of this region, but we still know very little about how the emergence of such abilities is linked to anatomical changes. A surprising new study by researchers at Stanford University now shows that the size of this face-selective brain continues to increase well into the second decade of life. The findings, published in the latest issue of the journal Science, challenge our assumptions about the patterns of brain development in adolescence. the size of the fusiform face area increased with age â it was larger in the adult participants than in the children, and the older the individual, the larger it was. By contrast, no such difference was seen in the adjacent place-selective region, whose size remained stable in all the adults. Gomez and his colleagues also tested the participantsâ face and place recognition memory, and found that their ability to recognise faces was closely related to the size of their FFA â the bigger their FFA, the better the memory for faces. Their ability to remember places, on the other hand, was not at all related to FFA size. This suggests that the FFA continues to grow into adulthood, and that this growth is tightly linked to an improved face recognition abilities. The findings nevertheless seem to provide yet another example of experience-dependent neuroplasticity, the process by which the things we do alter brain structure and function. Childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood are periods of life in which most of us expand our various social circles. The size of the FFA may therefore increase relative to the number of new faces we see and remember, and so it would also be interesting to whether its size does actually differ according to the number of friends we have.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2017/jan/05/face-selective-brain-region-continues-to-grow-in-adulthood
