Abstract
Recognizing the identity of a face is computationally challenging – it requires performing subtle distinctions between different individual faces while achieving invariance across identity-irrelevant differences between images. Previous human fMRI studies have found information about individual faces with invariance across changes in viewpoint in the right anterior temporal lobe and in occipitotemporal cortex. It remains unclear, however, whether face representations in these regions differ in terms of their invariance across identity-irrelevant differences between images. To address this question, we investigated the invariance of representations of individual faces generalizing across different face parts. In a behavioral training session, participants were trained to recognize three individual faces. On the following day, they took part in an fMRI experiment in which they were asked to recognize the identity of those faces when seeing images of the whole face or images of half of the face (left, right, upper, lower). Information about face identity with invariance across changes in the face half was individuated only in the right anterior temporal lobe. This finding points to the right anterior temporal lobe as the most plausible candidate region for the representation of face identity.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2014