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than three times as many pecks from hatchlings over uniformly yellow beaks with no red dots. Tinbergen found that isolated hand-reared birds would also sometimes peck at cherries or the red bottoms of tennis shoes. This suggests that extremely young birds have an unlearned preference for the color red, especially when placed on a beak. (See figure 2.) Tinbergen codified this sequence as follows: a sign stimulus triggers an innate releasing mechanism in the brain that leads to a fixed action pattern of behavior, or SS-IRM-FAP. In the case of the herring gull chick, the red dot in contrast with the yellow beak of its mother acted as a sign stimulus that triggered an innate releasing mechanism in its brain to deliver a fixed action pattern of pecking at the red dot. In turn, the chick’s pecking acted as a sign stimulus for the mother that triggered an innate releasing mechanism in its brain to deliver a fixed action pattern of food regurgitation.10

Figure 2. The SS-IRM-FAP System of Patternicity

a. Niko Tinbergen discovered that when a herring gull chick sees its mother gull’s yellow beak with a red dot, it promptly begins pecking at it, which causes the mother to regurgitate food for her chick to eat. This is the Sign Stimulus (SS)—Innate Releasing Mechanism (IRM)—Fixed Action Pattern (FAP) process. FROM JOHN ALCOCK, ANIMAL BEHAVIOR: AN EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH (SUNDERLAND, MASS.: SINAUER ASSOCIATES, 1975), P. 164. ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN NIKO TINBERGEN AND A. C. PERDECK, “ON THE STIMULUS SITUATION RELEASING THE BEGGING RESPONSE IN THE NEWLY HATCHED HERRING GULL CHICK,” BEHAVIOUR 3 (1950): 1–39.

b. Further experimental studies of the SS-IRM-FAP patternicity phenomenon revealed that yellow bills with a red dot receive four times as many pecks from hatchlings over uniformly yellow beaks with no red dot, and that some bill shapes act as superstimuli, triggering excessive begging. FROM NIKO TINBERGEN AND A. C. PERDECK, BEHAVIOUR 3 (1950): 1–39. REPRINTED IN JOHN ALCOCK, ANIMAL BEHAVIOR: AN EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH (SUNDERLAND, MASS.: SINAUER ASSOCIATES, 1975), P. 150.

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Facial Recognition Patternicity

Face recognition in humans is another form of the SS-IRM-FAP system of patternicity, and it begins shortly after birth. When an infant observes the cooing happy face of its mother or father, the face acts as a sign stimulus that initiates the innate releasing mechanism in its brain to trigger the fixed action pattern of smiling back, thereby setting up a symphony of parent-child staring and cooing and smiling—and bonding attachment. It need not even be a real face. Two black dots on a cardboard cutout elicit a smile in infants, although one dot does not, indicating that the newborn brain is preconditioned by evolution to look for and find the simple pattern of a face represented by two to four data points: two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, which may even be represented as two dots, a vertical line, and a horizontal line.

Facial-recognition software was built into our brains by evolution because of the importance of the face in establishing and maintaining relationships, reading emotions, and determining trust in social interactions. We notice the whites of someone’s eyes for directionality of their gaze. We detect the dilation of another’s pupils as a sign of arousal (anger, sexual, or otherwise). We scan others’ faces for emotional leakage: sadness, disgust, joy, surprise, anger, and happiness. We subtly notice the difference between a real and a fake smile in the upturn of the outer eyelids for the genuine article. Faces are important to a social primate species such as ourselves. This is why we are so inclined to see faces in random patterns in nature: the face on Mars that is an eroded mountain is my favorite example, but there are many others. (See figure 3.)

The location in the brain where faces are recognized and processed has now been established by neuroscientists. In general, inside the temporal lobes of the brain (just above your ears) there is a structure called the fusiform gyrus that we know is actively involved