What makes us human? Face identity recognition

Abstract

The face is the richest and most meaningful source of nonverbal signs for human social communication. Expertise in face identity recognition is specific to the human species. It depends both on genetics and extensive developmental experience and, in neurotypical adults, is supported by a human-specific network of category-selective populations of neurons in the right lateralized ventral occipito-temporal cortex (VOTC). I propose here that multimodal social semantic representations in the ventral anterior temporal lobe play a key role in developing and extending cortical memories of face identities through reentrant connections to posterior VOTC regions, in particular in the hominoid-specific fusiform gyrus. According to this view, human face (identity) recognition goes well beyond objective information decoding in vision, paving the way for an original neurosemiotic perspective on a key aspect of our social lives.