Neural microgenesis of personally familiar face recognition.
Despite a wealth of information provided by neuroimaging research, the neural basis of familiar face recognition in humans remains largely unknown. Here, we isolated the discriminative neural responses to unfamiliar and familiar faces by slowly increasing visual information (i.e., high-spatial frequencies) to progressively reveal faces of unfamiliar or personally familiar individuals. Activation in ventral occipitotemporal face-preferential regions increased with visual information, independently of long-term face familiarity. In contrast, medial temporal lobe structures (perirhinal cortex, amygdala, hippocampus) and anterior inferior temporal cortex responded abruptly when sufficient information for familiar face recognition was accumulated. These observations suggest that following detailed analysis of individual faces in core posterior areas of the face-processing network, familiar face recognition emerges categorically in medial temporal and anterior regions of the extended cortical face network.
Psychological Science Research Institute, Institute of Neuroscience, University of Louvain, 1348 Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium; Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, University of Glasgow, G12 8QB, Glasgow, United Kingdom meike.ramon@uclouvain.be.
Meike
M
Ramon
Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, University of Glasgow, G12 8QB, Glasgow, United Kingdom.
Luca
L
Vizioli
Psychological Science Research Institute, Institute of Neuroscience, University of Louvain, 1348 Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium;
Joan
J
Liu-Shuang
Psychological Science Research Institute, Institute of Neuroscience, University of Louvain, 1348 Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium;
Bruno
B
Rossion
D005145:Face; D006801:Humans; D055495:Neurogenesis; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual
amygdala; coarse-to-fine; fusiform face area; medial temporal lobe; personally familiar face recognition