Face-selective neurons in the vicinity of the human fusiform face area
Face perception is thought to be mediated by neural activity in the occipital and posterior temporal cortex. 1,2 However, the face-selective neurons at the cellular level in these areas in humans have never been demonstrated. We had a rare opportunity to record intracranial multi-unit activity in an epilepsy patient near the fusiform face area 2 (figure 1A). We identified 2 units with highly face-selective response to static images of familiar (famous) and unfamiliar faces (figure 1B and video 1; figure e-1a, doi.org/10.5061/dryad.81t0fq1) as well as to human and animal faces that appeared in a movie (figure 1C, video 1, figure e-1b).
Acknowledgment
The authors thank the patient for participating in this study, Leila Reddy for advice on using the wave_clus tool, and Roy Export SAS for permission to use material from The Circus.
References
1.
Bentin S, Allison T, Puce A, Perez E, McCarthy G. Electrophysiological studies of face perception in humans. J Cogn Neurosci 1996;8:551–565.
2.
Kanwisher N, Yovel G. The fusiform face area: a cortical region specialized for the perception of faces. Philos Trans R Soc B Biol Sci 2006;361:2109–2128.
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© 2019 American Academy of Neurology.
Publication History
Published online: January 21, 2019
Published in print: January 22, 2019
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The authors report no disclosures relevant to the manuscript. Go to Neurology.org/N for full disclosures.
Study Funding
This study was supported by an Alon Fellowship for outstanding young faculty members by the Israeli Council for Higher Education (V.A.), Israel Science Foundation (57/15) and Marie Skłodowska-Curie (702577) fellowships (T.S.M.), and the program “Investissements d'avenir” ANR-10-IAIHU-06 and the ICM-OCIRP.
Authors
Author Contributions
V. Axelrod: conceiving the study, designing and preparing the experiments, analyzing the data, writing, editing and revising the manuscript. C. Rozier: data acquisition. T.S. Malkinson: data acquisition, editing the manuscript. K. Lehongre: responsibility for intracranial recording infrastructure, editing the manuscript. C. Adam: responsibility for intracranial recording infrastructure. V. Lambrecq: responsibility for intracranial recording infrastructure, editing the manuscript. V. Navarro: responsibility for intracranial recording infrastructure, editing the manuscript. L. Naccache: conceiving the study, supervising the project, editing the manuscript.
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