Abstract
Personally familiar faces are processed more robustly and efficiently than unfamiliar faces. The human face processing system comprises a core system that analyzes the visual appearance of faces and an extended system for the retrieval of person-knowledge and other nonvisual information. We applied multivariate pattern analysis to fMRI data to investigate aspects of familiarity that are shared by all familiar identities and information that distinguishes specific face identities from each other. Both identity-independent familiarity information and face identity could be decoded in an overlapping set of areas in the core and extended systems. Representational similarity analysis revealed a clear distinction between the two systems and a subdivision of the core system into ventral, dorsal and anterior components. This study provides evidence that activity in the extended system carries information about both individual identities and personal familiarity, while clarifying and extending the organization of the core system for face perception.
Highlights
A wide and distributed network of brain areas underlies face processing
Familiar faces recruit Theory of Mind (ToM) areas such as the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), because they are more strongly associated with person knowledge[2,16,18]; they activate the precuneus and the anterior temporal cortices, suggesting retrieval of long-term episodic memories; they modulate the activity in the amygdala and insula, suggesting an increased emotion processing[2,13,18]
Because familiarity information is necessarily confounded with identity information, we used MVP classification (MVPC) to dissociate which areas of the core and extended system encode identity-independent familiarity information, and which parts of the network encode identity information
Summary
A wide and distributed network of brain areas underlies face processing. The model by Haxby and colleagues[1,2,3] posited a division between a core system involved in the processing the visual appearance of faces—comprising the Occipital Face Area (OFA), the Fusiform Face Area (FFA), and the posterior Superior Temporal Sulcus (pSTS)—and an extended system, comprising parietal, frontal, and subcortical areas, involved in inferring socially relevant information from faces, such as direction of attention, intentions, emotions, and retrieval of person knowledge[1,2,3,4]. The human face processing pathway culminated in the right ATFA and IFG-FA where we recorded a view-invariant representation of face identity. While both unfamiliar and familiar faces effectively activate the core system[7,8,11,13,14], familiar faces activate the extended system more strongly than unfamiliar faces[2,13,15,16,17]. Detection of personally familiar faces is facilitated even in conditions of reduced attentional resources and without awareness[19]
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