Faces and Brains: The Limitations of Brain Scanning in Cognitive Science

Abstract

The use of brain scanning now dominates the cognitive sciences, but important questions remain to be answered about what, exactly, scanning can tell us. One corner of cognitive science that has been transformed by the use of neuroimaging, and that a scanning enthusiast might point to as proof of scanning's importance, is the study of face perception. Against this view, we argue that the use of scanning has, in fact, told us rather little about the information processing underlying face perception and that it is not likely to tell us much more.

Keywords:

• Brain Scanning
• Face Recognition
• Fusiform Face Area
• Neuroimaging
• Perception
• Representation