Journal
CEREBRAL CORTEX
Volume 33, Issue 8, Pages 4677-4687Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS INC
DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhac371
Keywords
face perception; familiarity; sEEG; top-down
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This study reveals the neural mechanism of familiar face perception by recording intracranial electrophysiological signals. The findings suggest that familiarity enhances face representations after initial extraction and viewing familiar faces increases coupling between different brain areas.
Humans can accurately recognize familiar faces in only a few hundred milliseconds, but the underlying neural mechanism remains unclear. Here, we recorded intracranial electrophysiological signals from ventral temporal cortex (VTC), superior/middle temporal cortex (STC/MTC), medial parietal cortex (MPC), and amygdala/hippocampus (AMG/HPC) in 20 epilepsy patients while they viewed faces of famous people and strangers as well as common objects. In posterior VTC and MPC, familiarity-sensitive responses emerged significantly later than initial face-selective responses, suggesting that familiarity enhances face representations after they are first being extracted. Moreover, viewing famous faces increased the coupling between cortical areas and AMG/HPC in multiple frequency bands. These findings advance our understanding of the neural basis of familiar face perception by identifying the top-down modulation in local face-selective response and interactions between cortical face areas and AMG/HPC.
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