Neurophysiology of human face recognition

Abstract

Neurotypical human adults have a high level of expertise in facial recognition, a key brain function for the quality of their social interactions. Studying cerebral mechanisms of facial recognition should help us understanding the most complex mechanisms of perception, memory, learning, as well as integration of semantic knowledge, emotion and attention in the brain. Neurophysiological studies performed in the macaque monkey brain are usually taken as providing evidence for the mechanisms of human face recognition but their relevance is limited by the weak capacities of this species in facial recognition compared to humans, and the absence of a human-like ventral occipito-temporal circuit selectively involved in face recognition. Functional magnetic resonance imaging studies in humans have identified a large network of occipito-temporal face-selective regions, dominant in the right hemisphere, but are limited in their temporal resolution and by important variations of signal in this region. By coupling electrophysiological recordings on large sample of human brain implanted with stereoelectroencephalography (SEEG) with fast periodic visual stimulation, this presentation will show how we can objectively and rapidly map human facial recognition in the human ventral temporal lobe, in order to make significant progress in our understanding of this function.