Milner Face Perceptions

This paper explores two published articles written by feminist psychologist Brenda Milner, and how her success has contributed to the field of neuroscience. Brenda Milner has a career focus on cognitive neuroscience, neuropsychology of memory, and frontal lobe function. She has had much success in these areas, as she has been called one of the world’s foremost authorities on memory. She has also contributed tremendously to the understanding of the inner workings of the brain. One of the articles in this paper discusses the perception of faces by patients with localized cortical excisions. Research by Milner, Kolb, and Taylor (1983) show that different face perceptions are seen with different lesions of the brain. The other article discuss the

The importance of properly recognizing faces has given rise to understanding the neurological mechanisms behind it. According to Milner, Kolb, and Taylor (2004), the right hemisphere plays a dominant role in facial recognition. The study that was done in this article was intended to compare the effects of circumscribed lesions of all the lobes except occipital regarding the perception of faces. There was a control group and then four groups of patients; each having undergone a unilateral brain operation. After the procedure, 19 pictures were shown, 9 male and 10 female. For 10 of the pictures, the face that was compared was shown in normal orientation and for the remaining 9 pictures, the face of comparison was the mirror image of the normal orientation. (Milner et al.,1983) found that the results supported the original statement that right temporal lobe lesions show multiple changes in face perception. The absence of a choice for the left visual field in patients with lesions in right temporal or right parieto-occipital lobes is evidence that both of those areas play a role in the normal processing of faces. This briefly describes the study that Milner conducted along with her colleagues. Milner’s contribution to understanding the perception of faces is still used today and other scientists continue to build on her

She later graduated from Cambridge with a B.A in experimental psychology. While Milner was obtaining her PhD, she was studying epileptic patients. Later when she achieved her PhD, she started studying the effects of temporal lobe damage on humans. This relates back to her published article on the perception of faces by patients with different types of lesions. She has received the international balzan prize and has even been admitted to the Canadian Science and Engineering hall of fame. Milner went on to work at MNI where she was asked to work with the patient known as H.M. This young man suffered from serious seizures from the age of only 10. H.M agreed to undergo a surgery that removed his medial temporal lobes from both sides. Even though his seizures were greatly reduced, he was unable to store new memories into his long term memory; a term known as anterograde amnesia. Milner worked with him to test his memory and reading abilities and what she found was ground breaking. He steadily improved on the tasks from earlier even though he had no recollection of doing them. The article in which this discovery was published has since been one of the most cited publications in the history of neuroscience. She realized that the brain does not only have one memory system but multiple. Milner also studied a