http://mindhacks.com/2007/06/26/harnessing-humans-for-subconscious-computing/ Neuroscience and psychology news and views. Mon, 20 May 2013 15:51:40 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ http://mindhacks.com/2007/06/26/harnessing-humans-for-subconscious-computing/#comment-7315 Wed, 27 Jun 2007 05:25:49 +0000 http://mindhacksblog.wordpress.com/2007/06/26/harnessing-humans-for-subconscious-computing/#comment-7315 The sort of thing the authors are talking about seems entirely impractical. To get it to work, you need to have the viewer wearing an EEG cap, which presumably is attached through wires to a computer, and depending on the setup you may also have to get wet gunk in their hair. This is clearly not something where they can take advantage of spare moments of people’s time in day to day life. And if you’re going to go through the trouble of getting volunteers to sit at your workstation with an EEG cap on, it would probably be a lot easier for both you and the volunteer if s/he just classified an image as face or non-face with a keypress. So until the days when everyone has wireless microelectrodes implanted in their brains, this stuff doesn’t seem all that useful.
chris: Most likely they are using the N170 waveform to indicate the presence of faces. The N170 is supposed to be specific to face detection, and I’m not aware of any controversy over its functional correlates analogous to the controversy over FFA.

]]> http://mindhacks.com/2007/06/26/harnessing-humans-for-subconscious-computing/#comment-7314 Tue, 26 Jun 2007 23:42:27 +0000 http://mindhacksblog.wordpress.com/2007/06/26/harnessing-humans-for-subconscious-computing/#comment-7314 Word has it that the same is being done by the military for the detection of conspicuous images in satellite data, using imagery experts. Given the debates about the FFA as either a face area or expertise area, I wonder whether they’re detecting the same waveforms.

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