Shared neural codes for visual and semantic information about familiar faces in a common representational space

Processes evoked by seeing a personally familiar face encompass recognition of visual appearance and activation of social and person knowledge. Whereas visual appearance is the same for all viewers, social and person knowledge may be more idiosyncratic. Using between-subject multivariate decoding of...

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Published inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS Vol. 118; no. 45; pp. 1 - 8
Main Authors di Oleggio Castello, Matteo Visconti, Haxby, James V., Gobbini, M. Ida
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States National Academy of Sciences 09.11.2021
Subjects
Adult
Biological Sciences
Brain - diagnostic imaging
Brain - physiology
Decoding
Face
Facial Recognition - physiology
Female
Functional magnetic resonance imaging
Humans
Information processing
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Male
Microprocessors
Pattern recognition
Recognition, Psychology - physiology
Representations
Semantics
face recognition
brain decoding
familiar face processing
person knowledge
social perception
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Summary:Processes evoked by seeing a personally familiar face encompass recognition of visual appearance and activation of social and person knowledge. Whereas visual appearance is the same for all viewers, social and person knowledge may be more idiosyncratic. Using between-subject multivariate decoding of hyperaligned functional magnetic resonance imaging data, we investigated whether representations of personally familiar faces in different parts of the distributed neural system for face perception are shared across individuals who know the same people. We found that the identities of both personally familiar and merely visually familiar faces were decoded accurately across brains in the core system for visual processing, but only the identities of personally familiar faces could be decoded across brains in the extended system for processing nonvisual information associated with faces. Our results show that personal interactions with the same individuals lead to shared neural representations of both the seen and unseen features that distinguish their identities.
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Author contributions: M.V.d.O.C., J.V.H., and M.I.G. designed research; M.V.d.O.C. performed research; M.V.d.O.C, J.V.H., and M.I.G. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; M.V.d.O.C., J.V.H., and M.I.G. analyzed data; M.V.d.O.C., J.V.H., and M.I.G. wrote the paper; and M.I.G. provided funding.
1Present address: Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94703.
Edited by Kalanit Grill-Spector, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, and approved September 23, 2021 (received for review June 6, 2021)
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.2110474118