Abstract
How does the brain process the faces of familiar people? Neuropsychological studies have argued for an area of the temporal pole (TP) linking faces with person identities, but magnetic susceptibility artifacts in this region have hampered its study with fMRI. We ask this question using data acquisition and analysis methods optimized to overcome this artifact, including multi-echo sequences that substantially boost signal quality in the anterior temporal lobes. To precisely characterize functional organization in individual human brains, we scanned N = 10 participants using fMRI on a range of perceptual and cognitive tasks, across three scan sessions (7.5 hours per participant). Tasks involved visual perception, semantic judgment, and episodic simulation of close familiar people and places, and everyday objects. The resulting data identify a familiar face response in TP, reliably observed across each individual participant. This area responds strongly to visual images of familiar faces over images of unfamiliar faces, objects, and scenes, but also responds to a variety of abstract cognitive tasks that involve thinking about people, including semantic judgment and episodic simulation. In contrast, a nearby region of perirhinal cortex (PR) – consistent in location with the previously describe “anterior temporal lobe face area” – responds specifically to faces (familiar and unfamiliar), but not to social cognition tasks. This result argues for two separate streams for person and face processing within anterior temporal cortex. Face responses in TP and PR had a similar functional organization to regions our lab has previously observed in macaques, suggesting a possible homology across species. This work identifies a missing link in the human familiar face processing system that is well placed to integrate visual information about faces with higher-order conceptual information about other people.