Abstract
A large body of evidence has documented the involvement of occipitotemporal regions in face recognition. Neuropsychological studies found that damage to the anterior temporal lobes (ATL) can lead to face recognition deficits, and recent neuroimaging research has shown that the ATL contain regions that respond more strongly to faces than to other categories of objects. What are the different contributions of anterior temporal and occipitotemporal regions to face recognition? In a series of fMRI studies, we investigated representations of individual faces in the human ATL using computer generated face stimuli for which participants did not have individual-specific associated knowledge. Recognition of face identity from different viewpoints and from images of part of the face was tested, using an approach in which pattern classifiers are trained and tested on the responses to different stimuli depicting the same identities. The anterior temporal lobes were found to encode identity information about faces generalizing across changes in the stimuli. Invariant information about face identity was found to be lateralized to the right hemisphere. Some tolerance across image transformations was also detected in occipitotemporal regions, but it was limited to changes in viewpoint, suggesting a process of increasing generalization from posterior to anterior temporal areas. Consistent with this interpretation, information about identity-irrelevant details of the images was found to decline moving along the posterior-anterior axis, and was not detected in the ATL.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2014