The code for facial identity in the primate brain

By Le Chang, Doris Y. Tsao. 2017

581 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary: Primates recognize complex objects such as faces with remarkable speed and reliability. Here, we reveal the brain’s code for facial identity. Experiments in macaques demonstrate an extraordinarily simple transformation between faces and responses of cells in face patches. By formatting faces as points in a high-dimensional linear space, we discovered that each face cell’s firing rate is proportional to the projection of an incoming face stimulus onto a single axis in this space, allowing a face cell ensemble to encode the location of any face in the space. Using this code, we could precisely decode faces from neural population responses and predict neural firing rates to faces. Furthermore, this code disavows the longstanding assumption that face cells encode specific facial identities, confirmed by engineering faces with drastically different appearance that elicited identical responses in single face cells. Our work suggests other objects could be encoded by analogous metric coordinate systems.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

World Models (2018, methodology): “We are able to observe a scene and remember an abstract description thereof (Cheang & Tsao, 2017; Quiroga et al., 2005).”
The geometry of abstraction in hippocampus and prefrontal cortex (2020, methodology): “Linear mixed selectivity neurons have been observed in previous work (see, e.g., Raposo et al., 2014; Parthasarathy et al., 2017; Chang and Tsao, 2017; Dang et al., 2020).”
Cognitive computational neuroscience (2018, background): “A brain-computational model of face recognition(27) will have to explain the spatial clusters of face-selective units and the selectivities and invariances observed with fMRI(28,29) and invasive recordings.(25,30) Cognitive neuroscience has mapped the global functional layout of the human and nonhum”
Navigating cognition: Spatial codes for human thinking (2018, background): “Similarly, the role played by networks of brain regions acting in concert with the hippocampus (32, 63, 73, 74) for cognitive spaces and differences in the encoding of multidimensional stimulus spaces in other brain regions—for example, during face processing in monkey inferotemporal cortex (158)—sh”