Please read the following in preparation for class:

At around the 3:00 timestamp, Prof Kanwisher describes how she and other people attempted to determine if there is a brain region specialized for face recognition. First, she took MRI scans of her brain whilst looking at faces, and found a region that lit up. Then, she wonders if this region is specific to her brain; to determine if this is the case, she takes MRI scans of many other people--and discovers similar regions in the brains of almost all people studied. Then she asks how one could know that this region is responding to faces in particular, rather than just visual stimuli of any assortment of images. After looking at the stimulation of this region via many face-related and non-face-related images, she concludes that it indeed seems to be associated with faces in particular. 

She subsequently asks if this data shows that this region is integral to face recognition, and responds that it does not. She argues that without direct stimulation of this region in a conscious person, it is not possible to definitively conclude that this region is necessary for face recognition. It could be, for instance, that without this region a person could identify faces accurately, and that this region may make this process quicker, or perhaps assists in integrating this recognition in some way.  

To provide direct evidence for the role of this region, researchers stimulated the region in a conscious person. Notice that the first (the "SHAM") attempt includes no stimulation at all, and yet the patient is asked to describe what he sees. It is only on the second attempt that the stimulation is made. The patient was not aware of when the stimulation was being given, and so was unable to be influenced by the experimenter's expectations, body language, facial expressions, etc.

It could be argued that this series of experiments encapsulates many of the methodologies of science. Notice that she began with a hypothesis--a claim or statement about how the world works. At each step along the way, the scientists are trying to disprove the hypothesis by thinking about all of the ways in which the experiments might be misleading, thereby leading to incorrect conclusions. This is often called falsification. One tries to falsify, or disprove, a hypothesis.

Please stop here. The rest we will complete in class.

We will now complete the below activity in groups during class:

To sign in, you must input your CUNY credentials ("firstname.lastnameXX@login.cuny.edu", where "XX" are the last two digits of your student ID). You cannot use "qmail" credentials. If you get an error, please logout of your email/Office365 and then click on the below link.