Dr. Michael Kilgard

But it makes sense that the kinds of training, the inputs in, junk in, junk out –

We used to think, again, that bodies just grew.

Babies just got bigger.

That's all that happened.

And then we started realizing the things that they saw mattered.

At first we thought, well, let's find what they like.

What do they like the most?

You remember these old experiments where they found that if you give a baby a face and then you give it a cartoon face, it'll look more strongly at the cartoon face, the exaggerated black and white face.

And some babies had trouble disengaging from it.

The attention mechanisms were so cued to two black circles and a mouth.

And people sold baby mobiles that were these very engaging things that the babies couldn't get their eyes off of.

Now when you go to the Babies R Us or whatever store, you don't see those anymore.

You see much more naturalistic kinds of things.

But there was a moment when we thought, well, if the babies like it, give it to them.

And then we sort of thought maybe just because they like it is not sufficient.

Maybe we should try to do a longer-term read, not that short-term immediate gratification, but the longer term.

What does it do that the face I've seen is an extreme face, an exaggerated face?

And again, we think back to individual neurons, whether retinoganglion cells or cells in fusiform face area.

These are parts of the brain that are involved in visual processing.

If those areas are wired –