Greater orbitofrontal activity predicts better memory for faces

Having demonstrated recently that the orbitofrontal cortex is selectively involved when novel abstract visual information is encoded, we investigated whether the same orbitofrontal area would be activated during the encoding of novel human faces. The present positron emission tomography study demonstrated that area 11 in the right orbitofrontal region, which is directly linked to the medial temporal lobe, is a critical frontal area selectively activated when normal human subjects are engaged in encoding visually presented faces. Furthermore, better face recognition performance correlated with greater cerebral blood flow specifically in this orbitofrontal area.