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Ethnicity and gender detecting neurons: Evidence for a dedicated ``human-kind'' detector?

According to this PNAS paper by Minna Ng, Vivian M. Ciaramitaro, Stuart Anstis, Geoffrey M. Boynton and Ione Fine, they have found areas in the brain that are tuned for the placement of faces into ethnic and gender categories -- neurons found in the occipital cortex, fusiform areas, and the cingulate gyrus. Which is notable in part because those regions are not the ones usually cited in experiments where people distinguish faces from photos of other things. It's evidence, in any event, that the mind's ``face processing'' relies on human-kind categories, not just knowledge of the general traits of a face, or of the particular face of one familiar person.

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