Classifying blobs as faces

magritte
MIT researchers report in the journal Science that the brain relies on context to compensate for images that are noisy or degraded. For example, if you look at a person from very far away, their face may look like a blurry blob with no discernible features at all. Still, thanks to the contextual cues (in this case, the attached body), you still can classify the blob as a face. That seems obvious, of course. What's novel about this work is that the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to actually show that "the specific brain region known to be activated by clear images of faces is also strongly activated by very blurred images, just so long as surrounding contextual cues are present." Of course, surrealist artists like Rene Magritte have known this for years.
Link