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Humans are extraordinarily skillful in recognizing faces. In fact we tend to develop preferences for faces the moment we leave the womb, but scientists are looking for a plausible answer to how exactly humans came to possess this ability.

According to a recent research, patients with prosopagnosia - face blindness - learn as well as the average person to become experts at differentiating between highly similar exemplars of new objects. 

However the results were not same when patients of prosopagnosia were asked to learn a set of faces under the same conditions and they performed very poorly.

"What we wanted to do was to test a key prediction of the "expertise" hypothesis," said Constantin Rezlescu, a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Psychology and the first author of the study in the press release.

"The expertise hypothesis predicts that when there is impairment in facial processing, you should also see impairment in processing other objects of expertise, because if the mechanisms are the same, any damage should affect both faces and other objects. Our findings, however, show a clear dissociation between participants' ability to recognize faces and their ability to recognize other objects with which they became experts in recognizing."

 The findings also suggested that prosopagnosia is the result of damage to a brain mechanism which is dedicated to processing faces. 

"What we found is that prediction - which is a fundamental prediction of the expertise hypothesis - does not hold," Rezlescu added. "That provides indirect evidence that there may be some specific mechanism for processing faces, although it doesn't prove it directly. Our conclusion is that the expertise hypothesis, at least that relying on greeble studies, is false."

The findings of the research has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.