Finding your lost friend in a crowded place is a difficult task, but your brain makes it simpler through its capacity of paying special attention to objects, a research has found.
Picking out a face in the crowd is a complicated because the brain has to retrieve the memory of the face you're seeking, then hold it in place while scanning the crowd, paying special attention to finding a match, said the study.
The process of identifying an object is similar to finding out what is happening is a place, the finding showed.
Both object-based attention and spatial attention have similar mechanisms involving related brain regions.
"It seems like it's a parallel process involving different areas," said Robert Desimone, director of McGovern Institute for Brain Research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In both cases, the prefrontal cortex - the control center for most cognitive functions - appears to take charge of the brain's attention and control relevant parts of the visual cortex, which receives sensory input, the study said.
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For this study, the researchers used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to scan human subjects as they viewed a series of overlapping images of faces and houses.
The study appeared in the journal Science.